On Oct. 17, the Maryland Terrapins squandered a double-digit halftime lead against Rutgers — marking their fifth straight defeat of the season, at home, on homecoming. Four days later, the university announced head football coach Mike Locksley would be leaving.

Nolan Rogalski and Jude Wilkenfeld, managing editor and deputy editor of the student-run Testudo Times, headed to the team’s practice facility to get players’ reactions after they received a tip about a players’ meeting. But then a UMD Athletics staff member called the cops.

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Rogalski later posted on X: “Wilkenfeld and I were outside Jones-Hill House trying to get players to comment. An athletics staffer took pictures of us, and a police dispatch was called for suspicious activity; a cop and 2 cop cars pulled up, and officers ID’d us and asked us to leave.”

“We certainly didn’t mean to cause any trouble,” Rogalski says in the video he posted, “But as far as we were aware, we were standing in places we were allowed to stand.”

“I don’t disagree with you,” replies the officer.

Wilkenfeld said the staffer had never asked who he or Rogalski were, nor did they ask if they were student journalists.

“If the staffer had asked us who we were and what we were doing, the whole situation could have been avoided entirely,” Wilkenfeld told FIRE.

The Testudo Times later reposted Rogalski’s video along with an official statement from the University of Maryland’s Police Department and Maryland Athletics. “Due to heightened concerns for staff and player safety around the football program in recent weeks,” the statement said, “there has been increased security around athletics facilities. A UMPD officer approached the two individuals, learned they were with a campus media organization, recorded student IDs, and no report was taken.”

It added, “UMPD and Maryland Athletics respect the First Amendment rights of all journalists reporting in public spaces.”

Since the incident, UMD is making good on that statement. The UMD Athletics Department has agreed to meet with FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative to make sure students and staff alike are on the same page when it comes to their free speech rights. It’s a step in the right direction, and one FIRE would love to see from more universities across the country.

The Supreme Court has held that a college campus has “many of the characteristics of a public forum.” A large, open quad, for instance, has the same basic look and function of a city park. Sidewalks, like the one on which these student journalists stood, are also considered traditional public forums. As such, students — including student journalists — have the right to freely express themselves in these public spaces.

Luckily, Rogalski and Wilkenfeld knew their rights and stood up for themselves. Like other student journalists, they couldn’t simply rely on government officials to defend their rights, or even properly understand what they might be. Just last week, Cat Murphy — a student at UMD’s graduate school for journalism — had to stand her ground when U.S. Rep. Andy Harris falsely claimed that Maryland law required her to get his permission before recording him (that rule only covers private conversations). Harris even told his security to take her phone and get police to escort her out.

UMD students aren’t the only ones who have had to stand up for their rights in the field over the past few months. Dylan Hembrough, editor-in-chief of the independent student paper The Alestle at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, was reported to police by a university communications official when he simply tried to assert his and his campus newspaper’s right to free expression. An SIUE administrator stopped a reporter for The Alestle from interviewing staff without her present. In an email, Hembrough called out the university’s marketing and communications team for interfering with the student outlet’s newsgathering process, at which point the administrator reported Hembrough’s email as harassment. (It was not.) Hembrough has vocally defended his right to report, and SPFI’s case with SIUE remains ongoing.

Courts have held time and time again that universities have an obligation to maintain, among other constitutional rights, a free student press. As Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote in Shelton v. Tucker: “The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools.” It’s also important for universities to adequately articulate to faculty and staff what that maintenance looks like to protect the free, open “marketplace of ideas” college campuses are meant to be. Policies and practices safeguarding students’ right to free expression need to be fully articulated to all faculty and staff, and they should have support to uphold and follow through on those safeguards.

Among those safeguards must be a way to prevent students from self-censorship to avoid punishment or other retribution, keeping what’s called the “chilling effect” at bay. When authorities are called to investigate students standing on a sidewalk, that negatively affects student journalists’ ability to gather news and exercise their First Amendment rights and bolsters the chill. Not only does the call rattle student journalists in the moment, but it dissuades other student journalists in the future from using their own free expression to engage in reporting that benefits the whole community.

It’s great to see student journalists assert their rights. But public universities must also help by upholding their First Amendment obligations. Student journalists shouldn’t always have to fight to use their protected rights, and universities should cultivate an environment where student journalists feel comfortable enough to exercise those rights without fear of censorship, retaliation, or challenge.

It is a random Tuesday night, and you are relaxing on your living room couch scrolling through your social media feed. You read an article about foreign corruption and decide to make a post criticizing the government responsible for it. You make fun of a politician you don’t like, share a clip from an interview with your favorite political talking head, crack a joke about a pressing social issue, or make a plug for the blog post that you just finished writing. Then, you head to bed without giving it a second thought. This is America, after all, and the First Amendment is always there to protect you from the government.

Well, to protect you from our government.

Under the First Amendment, the United States cannot retaliate against you for constitutionally protected speech and expression. But the First Amendment does not necessarily protect you from a bureaucrat in Brussels, a judge in Brazil, or a police force in Hong Kong. Consider the case of Saad Ibrahim Almadi.

Almadi was a retired engineer living in Boca Raton, Florida. A dual U.S.-Saudi citizen, Almadi had lived in America since the 1970s and, over the past several years, had made around 14 posts criticizing the Saudi Arabian government. Those posts raised concerns about the destruction of older sections of Mecca and Jeddah, issues surrounding poverty in Saudi Arabia, and a few mentioned the assassination of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi while he was visiting a Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul. He voiced the same kinds of political grievances that millions of Americans talk and post about every day. And for years, nothing happened.

Then, in November 2021, Almadi took a trip to Riyadh to visit his family. He was arrested almost immediately after he landed and accused of “harboring a terrorist ideology.” In October 2022, a Saudi Arabian court sentenced him to 16 years in prison, followed by a 16-year travel ban preventing Almadi from leaving the country. An appeals court later increased his sentence to 19 years with a 19-year travel ban. Since Almadi was already in his 70s at the time, this meant that he would likely never return to the United States. He was eventually released after the charges against him were dropped in March 2023, but his travel ban remained in place.

Almadi did not make it back to the United States until November 2025, four years after he had left, and only after the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally visited the White House. His crime? Criticizing a foreign government from American soil.

It’s easy to write this off as an example of the repressive nature of an authoritarian monarchy. Surely a fellow liberal democracy, especially one that claims to have a proud tradition of free speech and expression, would never treat someone like that, right?

Unfortunately, Graham Linehan serves as an example of how even democratically elected governments regularly try to punish politically disfavored speech that occurs outside their borders. Linehan is an Irish comedy writer responsible for shows like Father Ted and The IT Crowd. He has been living in Arizona while he works on his next project. In April 2025, Linehan made a handful of posts about transgender activists. In several different posts, he advised women encountering a transwoman “in a female-only space” to “make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Later that year, Linehan took a flight from Arizona to Heathrow. When he stepped off the plane, five armed police officers arrested him for his comments, seized his bag and devices, and told him he could only post bail if he promised to stay off X.

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Thankfully, in May 2026, the Metropolitan Police apologized after an internal review found that “at times, both the investigation and arrest phases lacked the diligence one would expect.” But the message had already been conveyed loud and clear: Even comments you make outside the country have the potential to land you in jail.

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You’re reading the FIREwire, our weekly roundup of the latest news in free speech.

“Our business is to answer back wisely, modestly, and yet grandly.”

— Frederick Douglass, on renewed attacks on black Americans after Reconstruction.

First things first

In 1672, a Dutch mob murdered two brothers accused of treason, stripped them naked, strung them upside down, mutilated their bodies, and reportedly ate pieces of their organs. Horrified, philosopher Baruch Spinoza wrote a placard that read Ultimi barbarorum, “the worst of barbarians,” to display at the scene.

But according to a famous account, Spinoza’s landlord locked him inside, fearing the mob would murder him too. Spinoza was 39 at the time, and already familiar with the dangers of free speech. At 23, he had been excommunicated for questioning Scripture. At 37, two years before the murders, he had published a controversial defense of intellectual freedom, Theological-Political Treatise, declaring that “the true purpose of the state is in fact freedom.” Spinoza believed governments exist to protect freedom, but what happens when fear frightens us into silence before government even acts?

Meta’s $25 billion penalty

A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion after a jury found the company had violated the state’s consumer protection law by misleading users about its privacy practices, data control, and content moderation — FIRE takes no positions on the privacy or data-protection findings.

“If not overturned,” writes Trace Mitchell, “this verdict will have a massive chilling effect on what platforms say about their content moderation practices. The safest course of action for any platform may be to say as little as possible about how it moderates content, to as few people as possible.”

Below the fold

• A student journalist stood her ground when a Maryland congressman called for the cops over her recording a public press conference. Rep. Andy Harris cited the state’s all-party consent law, but as Marie McMullan explains, private conversations and public events are two different things.

Around the world

Four British police officers arrested a 15-year-old over a joke on social media, Sarah McLaughlin reports, after he posted an edited photo of a local politician wearing bunny ears and called him a “rent boy,” or young male prostitute.

McLaughlin also takes us to Turkey, where authorities blocked more than 1,270 X accounts, France where an activist was criminally convicted for saying “women . . . are obliged to be wary of people with penises,” and Saudi Arabia where a court overturned a migrant worker’s death sentence for a Facebook post insulting the prophet Muhammad.

The long view

Frederick Douglass’ defense of free expression survived even bitter betrayal, as Jacob Mchangama explains in the fourth and final installment of his compelling series on the life and philosophy of the famed abolitionist and writer.

The freedoms that enabled Black Americans to challenge white supremacy also protected a Klansman’s right to express his repugnant beliefs. Douglass understood free speech and equality as mutually reinforcing. His response to the betrayal of emancipation’s promises was to insist on the freedom to expose injustice, organize and answer back. Those who now treat free speech and racial equality as mutually exclusive should reckon with that history.

Podcasts

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the American idea, hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In “Hamilton vs. Jefferson,” Rosen discusses Alexander Hamilton’s belief in a strong national government, Thomas Jefferson’s emphasis on states’ rights and limited federal power, and how the tension between them still shapes American politics today.

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So to Speak takes an uncensored look at free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech, hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

In “Why you should talk to strangers,” Nico talks with Fin Colleton and Kratima Divakar of American Dialogues, a project that brings folding chairs into New York City parks and invites complete strangers to discuss politics and culture, and whether face-to-face conversations can bridge political divides.

Required reading

Cybersecurity researcher Joshua Michael mapped more than 170,000 Flock surveillance cameras across the country using data he says was public. Flock Safety’s response? Its representatives demanded he take down the website, alleging trademark infringement, then accused him of unauthorized computer access.

Matthew Harwood examines Flock’s legal threats, including an earlier trademark dispute with another camera-mapping project, and explains how companies can use intellectual property law to intimidate researchers who bring matters of public concern to light.

Today in history with

On Oct. 21, 2019, Australian newspapers ran front pages covered in black bars as a protest against government secrecy and threats to press freedom. The campaign was led by Australia’s Right to Know Coalition and was supported by TV, radio, and online outlets, as well. The protest was sparked by police raids on journalists investigating alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and government surveillance. A 2019 survey by the Coalition found that while 87% of Australians said the country should be a free, open, and transparent democracy, only 37% said it actually was.

By the numbers

Two new FIRE analyses paint a troubling picture of free expression on campus. Sean Stevens reports that attempts to cancel campus speakers have reached an all-time high, topping 200 for the first time, with government officials increasingly taking part.

Meanwhile, Chapin Lenthall-Cleary finds students who get their news exclusively from social media are substantially less tolerant of controversial campus speakers, but that female students are far less tolerant than males, regardless of where they get their news.

Human beings possess many wonderful qualities but one widespread, and less laudable, trait is this: We’re often pretty damn lazy, too. We seek easy fixes for complex problems, reaching for Band-Aids for wounds that need stitches or a fresh coat of paint to conceal a crack in a house’s foundation.

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An…

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On Oct. 21, a New Mexico state court ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion to the state for violating its consumer protection laws. The state claims in a suit by its attorney general that Meta misrepresented its content moderation and data protection practices in various statements over an 11-year span. And according to the judge, the penalty could have been far worse, as the state could have been awarded up to $219 billion under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act.

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While most coverage has characterized the suit as a privacy case, the claims the state advanced are fundamentally about speech. In fact, three of the five categories of alleged misrepresentations have absolutely nothing to do with data privacy. Instead, they concern moderation around “hateful, violent, and divisive content,” “misinformation,” and “equal application of Facebook’s policies.” That is, statements like, “We do not profit from misinformation or hate, and we do not want this content on our platforms” and “We do not allow hate speech on Facebook because it creates an environment of intimidation and exclusion, and in some cases, may promote real-world violence.”

Each is based on what speech Facebook allows, what speech it takes down, or whether it treats different speakers in the same way.

The First Amendment does not protect fraud, to be sure. But “hateful, violent, and divisive content” and “misinformation” are incredibly vague and inherently subjective concepts. They lack clear legal definitions and encompass a wide range of constitutionally protected speech. Yet the lawsuit allowed a jury to interpret the terms and somehow evaluate the accuracy of Facebook’s high-level statements about how it tries to moderate content.

To decide whether a statement like “we do not allow hate speech” was false, jurors had to apply their own understanding of those broad terms — then decide whether Facebook applied its policies truthfully and equally, across billions of posts dealing with some of the most contentious political and social issues of the last decade. Again, these exceedingly amorphous concepts mean something different to everyone. What one juror views as hate speech or misinformation may be another juror’s sincerely held opinion. That makes it all but impossible to prove falsity — a necessary element of any fraud case.

Nevertheless, the jury found Facebook committed 43,899,725 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act.

43,899,725.

How? By multiplying the 26 statements Facebook made about its policies by the total number of users in the state — and, for some statements, New Mexicans who don’t even have Facebook accounts — regardless of whether the users actually read the statement.

That math is as shaky as the claims against the company. For one thing, many of the statements were not advertising at all. They included executives speaking publicly about how Facebook handles some of the most contested content moderation questions platforms confront. The executives made those statements across 11 years and, as the judge himself noted, they “were not confined to one statement, one speaker, one medium or one aspect of Facebook’s business,” but instead included earnings calls, television interviews, and press conferences. And under the state’s theory, every additional person who might have heard it served as another violation. The larger the audience, the larger the ultimate penalty.

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Regards to Robert Putnam, I guess.

Recall how the diagonal axes combine to form the compass. Higher tolerance for both left and right pushes you upward. A leftward bias (i.e. higher tolerance for the left and lower tolerance for the right) pushes you leftward, and vice versa.

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Among both men and women, those who get their news from social media are less tolerant than most other points on the graph. Those who get their news from TV are even less tolerant. By contrast, people who get news from print and online newspapers are unusually tolerant, though only modestly. The same is true of men who get news from podcasts.

Okay, people are able to select multiple sources here. If we’re interested in understanding the effect that social media has (and other sources have) upon tolerance, we’d arguably get a clearer picture by restricting the plot to students who only selected a single news source:

Get off your damn phone. Yes, you.

When we restrict our analysis to those who only get their news from a single source, the gap between those who get their news from social media and everyone else widens. Getting news from only social media is tied to substantially lower tolerance. To a lesser extent, the same is true of TV.

Another interesting detail: compared to the previous plot, the clusters of points shift right, suggesting that people who get their news from a single source are more likely to be right-biased (or less left-biased) in their tolerance. Indeed, students who get their news from exactly one source lean more conservative than those who get their news from any other number of sources.

Out of curiosity (and because you should obviously always check sample size in this line of work), how many students are getting their news solely from social media? And…it’s 5,658 men (26%) and 7,374 women (19.7%) — excluding students who’ve quit the survey by this point.

In our sample, a quarter of male students and a fifth of female students get their news only from social media. Interestingly, though men are more likely to get their news from only social media, women are more likely to get news from social media overall (86.1% vs. 90.8%). Men, in other words, are more likely to occupy both extremes on this subject (i.e. relying solely upon social media for news or not getting news there at all). Also note that many of the points on the one-source-only plot have small sample sizes and should be treated as fairly uncertain (social media, online news, and the averages look reliable; the others are hard to tell).

These results certainly don’t prove that social media use causes intolerance. But they do suggest a possible significant contributor to the dismal state of free speech and open discourse on college campuses (and society at large). And likewise, this potential source of intolerance points us towards a possible avenue for improving these issues.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.

Today, free speech is among America’s most powerful values. But for most of the nation’s history, the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech did little to protect those who challenged power or offended public morals. A newspaper publisher could be prosecuted for ridiculing the president. A birth-control advocate could be gagged by Boston’s mayor. Protesters could be jailed for distributing antiwar leaflets, and an author could even be arrested for reading the Constitution aloud.

In Free Speech Generation, FIRE Executive Vice President Nico Perrino tells the dramatic story of the people who made the First Amendment’s promise real. Some were lawyers and professors. Others were journalists, students, internet pioneers, and professional heretics. Many first embraced free speech as a tactic in fights for labor, civil rights, sexual freedom, or peace. However, over time, they forged it into a principle — one they extended even to communists, Klansmen, neo-Nazis, flag burners, and pornographers.

PRE-ORDER AT SIMON & SCHUSTER, BARNES & NOBLE, AMAZON, AND MORE

Through vivid portraits and courtroom battles, Free Speech Generation reveals:

• How America went 140 years before the Supreme Court first struck down a speech restriction under the First Amendment

• Why a Jewish lawyer defended neo-Nazis who wanted to rally where thousands of Holocaust survivors lived

• How the Berkeley Free Speech Movement anticipated a constitutional revolution

• How burning the American flag came to represent a “bedrock” First Amendment principle

• How early cyber-libertarians stopped Congress from imposing broad censorship rules on the emerging internet

• Why today’s fights over hate speech, campus censorship, misinformation, and political retaliation continue battles civil libertarians have fought for decades

At once a collective biography, constitutional history, and political drama, Free Speech Generation asks whether the civil libertarians who created America’s Free Speech Century left behind a lasting inheritance — or a fragile achievement already beginning to crack.

PRE-ORDER NICO’S BOOK AND FILL OUT THIS FORM FOR A FREE T-SHIRT

• Preorder a copy of Free Speech Generation by Nico Perrino in any format, including ebook, from any retailer (or buy it on release day) and submit your receipt below to receive a limited-edition FIRE T-shirt, free with an order made by Jan. 19, 2027, at 11:59 p.m. ET.

• This promotion is limited to one entry per person, and the deadline to submit your proof of purchase is Jan. 19, 2027, at 11:59 p.m. ET.

• Those who submit eligible proof of purchase by the deadline, before supplies run out, will receive their T-shirt by mail in February 2027. All shirts ship together after the entry period closes. After the promotion ends, remaining shirts will be sold in FIRE’s online store.

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Book cover art: Used with permission of The Oakland Tribune 2026. All rights reserved.

T-Shirt art: March from Sproul Plaza to Regent’s meeting in University Hall on Oxford St., Steven Marcus Free Speech Movement Photographs, circa 1964, BANC PIC 2000.002--NEG Strip 44:33 © The Regents of the University of California, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/54188

This essay was originally published on Sept. 24, 2026, on Jacob Mchangama’s Substack.

This is the fourth installment of my series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus. The first examined his defense of wartime dissent; the second, press freedom and defamation; the third, the mobs that enforced slavery’s code of silence.

The first three installments followed Douglass’ fight for freedom and equality through words, even as that struggle culminated in war. This installment examines a more difficult issue. Douglass spent two decades insisting that free speech would defeat slavery and secure freedom. Then emancipation came, constitutional amendments passed and, for a short while, it looked as if Douglass’ vision of “a reform absolutely complete” had triumphed. But soon Reconstruction was being dismantled. Free speech had helped win the argument, but the “sacred right” was once again overawed. What does a man do with his first principles when the victory they helped secure proved fleeting rather than permanent?

The question is relevant even today. A growing share of Americans has become skeptical of the value of free speech. In our 2025 Future of Free Speech Index, the United States recorded the third-largest decline in support for free expression of the 33 countries surveyed. Among Americans aged 18 to 34, only 47% said speech offensive to minority groups should be permitted, compared with 70% of those over 55. Douglass belonged to the most despised minority in the country, was slandered, mobbed and nearly killed for speaking, and watched the constitutional settlement he had fought for be dismantled in his lifetime. His answer is worth knowing.

‘A reform absolutely complete’

On February 6, 1863, Frederick Douglass celebrated the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation as perhaps “the greatest event of our nation’s history, if not the greatest event of the century.” With Lincoln’s momentous proclamation, Douglass declared: “At last the out-spread wings of the American Eagle afford shelter and protection to men of all colors.”

The Emancipation Proclamation, the defeat of the Confederacy and the adoption of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments prohibiting slavery and promising equal protection and the right to vote for the recently emancipated Black population seemed to fulfill Douglass’ life’s mission as an abolitionist and human rights defender. Yet over the following decades, Douglass’ joy at emancipation was mixed with bitter disappointment at the stark contrast between the fine principles enshrined in these documents and their practical nullification through oppressive laws, racist terror and mob action in the South.

Douglass had often insisted that the practical protection of freedom of speech throughout the Union would defeat slavery. Free speech was the foundation of individual freedom and democratic self-government, the great moral renovator of society, the precondition for the triumph of truth and reason over error and falsehood and the antidote to fanaticism and orthodoxy.

But would Douglass’ faith in freedom of speech survive the bloody and bitter disappointment of a failed Reconstruction in the South, where former rebels “who deliberate with daggers and vote with revolvers” were emboldened by a prejudiced public opinion and given a pass by the federal government?

In “Reconstruction,” published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1866, Douglass offered his blueprint for a new America repudiating President Andrew Johnson’s conciliatory attitude toward white Southerners and indifference to the Black freedmen. Douglass’ prescription for a “government consistent with itself” was to “render the rights of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.”

This would not be achieved by vesting “despotic power” in the federal government, but by enfranchising “every loyal citizen.” The right to vote, Douglass expected, would “form a wall of fire” for the protection of all citizens, Black or white. The resounding Republican victory in the midterm elections of 1866 gave him hope that this bold vision for a republic that no longer would “den[y] to any of its citizens equal rights and equal means to maintain them” could be realized:

In every considerable public meeting … the subject has been discussed, and the people have emphatically pronounced in favor of a radical policy. … they have everywhere broken into demonstrations of the wildest enthusiasm when a brave word has been spoken in favor of equal rights and impartial suffrage. Radicalism, so far from being odious, is now the popular passport to power.

In other words, open discussion and free elections would open the South “to the light of law and liberty.” For a while, this policy won support in the Republican-controlled Congress and charted a hopeful course for Black Americans in the South who were being reshackled by Black Codes and terror.

In 1870, Douglass gave a short speech at the final meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, where it triumphantly disbanded, its mission accomplished. Douglass hailed the occasion as marking “a reform absolutely complete.” He noted how different everyday life had become for the combative abolitionist long accustomed to being greeted by mobs, epithets and rotten eggs. But now: “The old elements of malice and hate and contempt that I once saw written in the faces of men, seem mostly to have disappeared.”

Douglass, normally an unstoppable fountain of speech, declared himself at a loss for words to “express my sense of the great triumph of justice and liberty” achieved by the rapid succession of emancipation, equal protection and the right to vote ensured by the 13th–15th Amendments.

‘Reconstruction a failure’

Alas, the spirit of radical zeal gradually lost its grip on Congress, and what had seemed like a reform absolutely complete by 1870 looked more and more like a dilapidated halfway house as Reconstruction unraveled.

As early as 1871, Douglass sounded the alarm about “Liberty of Speech South,” or what I called the “Segregationist’s Veto” in “Douglass versus the Mobocrats.” He painted a hagiographic image of Northern commitment to free expression. Nothing had so aroused the North’s “hatred” against slavery in the South as “the absolute denial of freedom of speech.” Yet ex-slaveholders and rebels were once again denying this freedom to Northerners and others who — he claimed — were murdered in their thousands for daring to express their commitment to equality or declare themselves Republicans. Douglass’ conclusion struck a very different tone than the triumphalist speech in New York the previous year:

Until a man can express his opinion upon all possible subjects as freely and as safely at the South as he does at the North, freedom is the merest farce, and reconstruction a failure.

In May 1878, Douglass delivered a Memorial Day address in New York’s Union Square. His assessment of Reconstruction had grown even darker than his early warning seven years earlier. Freedom of speech and the ballot had “fallen before the shot-guns of the South.” Yet he insisted that “we need bate no jot of heart or hope.” Even as he acknowledged the destruction of the protections on which his earlier optimism rested, he continued to profess his belief in their resurrection.

But restoring life to the protections that had been dangled before Black Southerners, only to be cruelly snatched away, required confronting something constitutional amendments had failed to eradicate. In “The Color Line” in 1881, Douglass described the prevalent anti-Black racial prejudice as a moral disorder that “fortifies itself by refusing all contradiction.” Slavery had given its beneficiaries “a thousand reasons for painting the black man as fit only for slavery.” The former Slavocracy’s wealth and influence had enlisted the press, pulpit and politicians in spreading that picture. Emancipation had abolished human ownership while leaving much of its ideological justification intact. Yet Douglass rejected the claim that racial prejudice was an immutable feature of human nature. His essay itself was an attempt to expose its origins and reason his readers out of it.

That diagnosis gave him ample reason to distrust public opinion. His longstanding warning about suppressing discussion nevertheless held. Back in 1852, he had explained how censorship directed against one group could endanger the liberties of others:

If they can prohibit the discussion of the rights of black men, they may also, bye and bye, prohibit the discussion of the rights of white men. Liberty for all, or chains for all.

‘The gates of reason are still open’

Strikingly, his later defense of free expression rested on extolling the immense benefits of this freedom, even as he decried the way it was exercised by the power and wealth of Southern segregationists and their Northern apologists. In an April 1883 address, Douglass condemned a press that “usually tries him in advance of the courts,” preparing the way for juries to convict Black defendants. Yet the persistence of public discussion remained a ground for hope:

There is no modern Joshua who can command this resplendent orb of popular discussion to stand still.

The country was “governed by ideas as well as by laws.” Despite the violence and exclusion, he insisted: “The gates of reason are still open to us; and, while we may speak and vote, we need not despair.”

Addressing the National Colored Convention in Louisville that September, Douglass developed the argument further. Conventions airing grievances, “whether real or fancied,” were “the safety-valves of the Republic, a wise and safe substitute for violence, dynamite, and all sorts of revolutionary action.”

Even unfounded grievances could be exposed through public scrutiny. Employed as such, free speech was the antithesis of violence: a means of transforming anger and dissatisfaction into public argument, collective action and the pursuit of peaceful change through the ballot rather than the gun.

By 1888, the distance between constitutional promises and practical freedom had become intolerable. At an emancipation anniversary in Washington, Douglass described Black Americans in the South as “in law free, in fact a slave.” Citizenship brought obligations without adequate protection; voting rights coexisted with disfranchisement. An occasion normally devoted to celebration demanded an alarm: “There are times when neither hope nor fear should be allowed to control our speech.”

His appeal joined public exposure to concrete reform. He denounced exploitative Southern payment practices as a “villainous swindle” and urged the Black press to expose it, legislators to prohibit it and Black voters to withhold support from politicians who refused. Speech was part of the remedy needed to expose and reform a system built on the pillars of injustice and fraud.

The following year, in “The Nation’s Problem,” Douglass confronted the wave of opinion, laws and violence that made a mockery of the freedoms and protections that Black Americans had been promised after the war. His response supplies perhaps the clearest answer to whether the shattered promises had also shattered his faith in first principles:

I do not regard discussion as an evil in itself. I regard it not as an enemy, but as a friend. It has served us well at other times in our history, and I hope it may serve us well at this time.

However, he took no pleasure in the intense discussion of “The Negro problem.” That the question dominated public discourse at all was “a bitter disappointment” to him. He had believed Reconstruction would settle Black Americans’ membership in the political community for good and consign demands for legally enforced color lines to the dustbin of history. Now that settlement was being reopened. Yet his answer was not to shy away from the controversy or let his detractors speak unopposed: “Our business is to answer back wisely, modestly, and yet grandly.”

That commitment also extended to criticism within the Black community, where he defended the importance of identifying mistakes and harmful errors as essential for the progress and improvement needed to make equality a practical reality.

‘The light of truth’

Nor did this commitment blind Douglass to the relationship between racist speech and physical violence. In “Lynch Law in the South” (1892), discussed in a previous installment, he assigned responsibility beyond the men who carried out the killings. The mobs acted on a public sentiment cultivated “by wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit.” Northern prejudice helped sustain the same violence. His proposed response was to enlist these influential institutions in condemning lynching and changing the public sentiment that licensed it.

By “Lessons of the Hour” in 1894, his assessment of the national retreat was devastating: “The cause lost in the war, is the cause regained in peace, and the cause gained in war, is the cause lost in peace.” His faith in the nation’s conduct had been shaken, and he highlighted the culpability of “newspapers and magazines” for “increasing hate and dark suspicion” that fed the mob violence against Black Americans and the spread of lynch law to the North. But his remedies continued to combine public argument with the enforcement of constitutional rights. He demanded honest elections, protection from exploitation and an end to the evasion of equal citizenship. And he again summoned the institutions capable of shaping public opinion:

Let the great Northern press and pulpit proclaim the gospel of truth and justice against war now being made upon the negro.

Two years earlier, Douglass — already in his seventies — had found hope in a younger generation taking up the struggle that this “Prophet of Freedom” had inspired but would not live to see completed. The fearless civil rights and women’s rights advocate Ida B. Wells demonstrated what independent reporting could accomplish. Wells believed that “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” In the pursuit of truth, she traveled the South exposing fabricated rape allegations, including cases involving consensual interracial relationships, and killings for supposed offenses as trivial as being “sassy” toward whites. Her investigative reporting and commentary were considered a scandalous affront to the “honor” of white women and put her in extreme danger. In May 1892, a white mob — incited by local newspapers to torture and burn “the black wretch” — destroyed her Tennessee newspaper, The Memphis Free Speech, and Wells went into exile. Yet her investigation of lynching reached readers through her pamphlet Southern Horrors, which recounted dozens of stories of lynchings throughout the South and documented the racist logic behind this practice.

In an October 1892 letter to Wells endorsing Southern Horrors, Douglass wrote enthusiastically about the pamphlet’s content and impact:

There has been no word equal to it in convincing power. I have spoken, but my word is feeble in comparison. You give us what you know and testify from actual knowledge. You have dealt with the facts with cool, painstaking fidelity and left those naked and uncontradicted facts to speak for themselves.

Douglass acknowledged that repeated atrocities had hardened American moral sensibility. The evidence might encounter indifference as well as hostility. Yet even at a time of despair and hopelessness, silence was not an option: “we must still think, speak and work.”

‘Liberty for all, or chains for all’

Future generations of Americans did indeed continue to think, speak and work.

From the late 1950s, the civil rights movement won a series of landmark First Amendment cases that expanded protection for speech, press, assembly and association. Those victories gave protesters, organizers and journalists greater freedom to challenge segregation. In 1965, the legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. captured the contrast with the repression of the Cold War years: “We may come to see the Negro as winning back for us the freedoms the Communists seemed to have lost for us.”

Yet these freedoms still had to be defended. On April 3, 1968, less than twenty-four hours before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Mountaintop” speech in Memphis. A federal judge had issued an injunction preventing another march in support of the city’s striking sanitation workers. In language that echoed Douglass, King called upon America to honor its own professed ideals:

If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand … the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges. … But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly … the freedom of speech … the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.

The following year, the Supreme Court demonstrated how far those protections extended. In Brandenburg v. Ohio, it overturned the conviction of Clarence Brandenburg, a local Ku Klux Klan leader. The Court held that advocacy of violence was protected unless directed to inciting imminent lawless action and likely to produce it. Brandenburg’s legal team included Eleanor Holmes Norton, a young Black lawyer. Among the justices who voted unanimously to overturn his conviction was Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights icon and the first Black member of the Supreme Court.

While the immediate beneficiary of that outcome was a hardened racist, the decision enshrined a principle Douglass had advocated more than a century earlier: “Liberty for all, or chains for all.” The freedoms that enabled Black Americans to challenge white supremacy also protected a Klansman’s right to express his repugnant beliefs. Douglass understood free speech and equality as mutually reinforcing. His response to the betrayal of emancipation’s promises was to insist on the freedom to expose injustice, organize and answer back. Those who now treat free speech and racial equality as mutually exclusive should reckon with that history.

There’s a groundswell of demand to “do something” in the wake of the sexual assault claims at Cornell. But amid the outrage and concern over the incident, it’s critical to remember that one attempted remedy we actually know will not work is to return to a campus justice system in which the burden of proof is on the accused and basic civil liberties are cast aside. That social experiment has already been run. It failed.

Title IX, the law against sex discrimination in federally funded education programs, was passed in 1972. Debates at the time focused on how it would affect single-sex colleges and college athletics. Explicitly aimed at sex discrimination, the text of the law itself mentions neither sexual assault nor sexual harassment. Those became matters for Title IX gradually over the next couple of decades, as courts determined that sexual assault and sexual harassment were both forms of sex discrimination, and therefore covered under Title IX.

The Jane Doe lawsuit against Cornell and the accused students (as well as a fraternity, a sorority, and a local bar) hit national news at nearly the same time that the Trump administration officially removed the Biden-era regulations from the Federal Register. While almost certainly not related, some have connected the two, citing the Cornell incident to argue that regulations surrounding Title IX need to be changed again to reduce due process protections for the accused.

The Democratic Women’s Caucus in Congress, for example, has called for strengthening and expanding Title IX protections. “Just yesterday, Trump and Republicans eroded the processes in place for sexual misconduct investigations” by officially reinstating the 2020 regulations, the caucus said in late September. And the National Women’s Law Center pointed to the Cornell situation to argue that the 2020 rules removed “obligations for educational institutions to respond to sexual harassment” and have “led to fewer survivors wanting to report because they view the Trump administration’s 2020 rule as not one that is intended to protect them.”

Given the lurid and appalling details of the Cornell case, it’s no surprise we’re seeing calls to make such alleged misconduct easier to punish.

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But we don’t have to guess about whether this would be a bad idea. As a nation, we have already run a generation-long experiment of having the higher ed sector conduct Title IX complaint processes unburdened by even rudimentary protections — and it was a disaster. Since FIRE’s inception in 1999, we have seen case after case in which colleges held sexual misconduct “hearings” hardly worthy of the name, routinely denying accused students (and sometimes also the alleged victims) basic protections such as:

• The presumption of innocence;

• Notice to the accused student what he or she has allegedly done wrong, and the day; and location of the alleged wrongdoing;

• Notice of what rules were allegedly violated;

• The ability to review the evidence;

• The right to call and question witnesses at a disciplinary hearing;

• The ability to question the person making (or denying) the accusation;

• The right to impartial fact-finders.

That list of omissions may seem incredible. How could any proceeding be fair without these fundamental protections?

But it’s no exaggeration. For several years, FIRE produced Spotlight on Due Process reports to highlight the grim campus reality. In the first of those reports, issued in 2017, we rated the top 53 schools in that year’s U.S. News & World Report rankings based on 10 fundamental elements of due process, including all of those listed above. None of them fully provided all 10 protections. One school actually had a sexual misconduct policy that didn’t provide any of the 10 protections, even in part. Thirty-nine of the 53 schools did not even guarantee students the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, and 37 did not allow for meaningful cross-examination.

Elementary due process protections are essential for a credible system

Americans old enough to have been in high school or college around the turn of the millennium will likely remember at least two of the most prominent campus sexual assault stories: the 2006 Duke Lacrosse rape accusations, and the 2014 Rolling Stone story about an alleged incident at a University of Virginia fraternity house. Both stories turned out to be fraudulent. Both ended with millions of dollars being paid out in the wake of lawsuits, and the destruction of the careers of Mike Nifong, the Durham County district attorney disbarred for his persecution of the accused Duke students, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, the author of the Rolling Stone piece.

It would be foolish to extrapolate from these two cases that allegations of campus sexual assault are likely to be false. But it is equally foolish to come away with the conclusion that it’s not worth implementing basic protections to prevent false accusations from ruining the lives of those who are unjustly (or even just erroneously) targeted. Indeed, one need not get anywhere near an alcohol- and drug-fueled fraternity party to become involved in a campus Title IX controversy.

Because sexual harassment allegations frequently involve claims about sex-related expression (and sometimes only expression), the same campus courts and proceedings that deal with situations like the “Cornell 7” also deal with accusations that cover nothing more than speech someone claims to have found offensive. Both are adjudicated under the aegis of Title IX.

A generation of Title IX abuse to silence protected expression

Since FIRE’s inception, we have warned about the use of Title IX sexual harassment policies to police pure expression rather than conduct. In one of FIRE’s very first cases, more than 26 years ago, we wrote to Columbia Law School about an investigation into a well-known criminal law professor based on charges that he had created a hostile environment for his students by using an exam hypothetical that discussed violence against women. (Columbia ultimately agreed the speech was not harassment.) And then we spent decades repeating varieties of that over and over again to colleges from sea to shining sea: in 2000 (again), the University of Oklahoma. In 2001, Tufts. In 2004, Occidental and the University of New Hampshire. To New Jersey’s William Paterson University, as well as to the University of Pennsylvania, in 2005. To Temple in 2006. To East Georgia College in 2009. To Yale in 2010. (This is just a subset of public cases from the 2000s; it does not include cases in which FIRE was privately involved.)

The next decade only provided more of the same. Making things worse was a “Dear Colleague” letter issued by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in April 2011 that aimed to get schools to enforce Title IX in a manner that guaranteed that more of the accused would be found responsible for sexual misconduct, regardless of whether or not they were actually more likely to have committed the offense.

By effectively ordering schools to use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard instead of a higher standard such as “clear and convincing evidence,” the “Dear Colleague” letter, in a stroke, made it far easier to officially brand someone a harasser or even a rapist, at a level of certainty only infinitesimally better than a coin toss. It also encouraged schools to adopt a “single investigator” model where one person could serve as the investigator, prosecutor, and judge over Title IX hearings, with all the conflicts of interest that entails.

Colleges quickly implemented these changes, leading to an even greater flood of instances in which the rationale of sexual harassment was used as an excuse to silence protected speech. Again, cases at the University of Denver in 2011, the University of Colorado in 2013, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks in 2013-14, Louisiana State University and Northwestern in 2015, the University of Delaware and Brooklyn College in 2016, and Wichita State and Northwestern (again) in 2017 represent just a small subset of instances of 2010s-era Title IX abuses. By 2017, FIRE was aware of at least 180 lawsuits over unfair disciplinary procedures in the wake of the 2011 “Dear Colleague” Letter.

The situation at Northwestern University deserves special consideration because it illustrates so well the danger this expansive Title IX regime posed to expression about sex and gender. Both cases deal with Professor Laura Kipnis, a feminist film professor whose alleged Title IX offense, warranting a 72-day-long investigation, was . . . criticizing the university’s Title IX regime in an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Northwestern University, a perennial resident on just about every list of top colleges in the United States, with massive resources and access to the finest attorneys, took more than three months to determine whether it is a violation of Title IX to criticize Title IX. (It is not.) Actually, that’s too charitable to Northwestern; it only dropped the investigation after Kipnis wrote a follow-up essay for the Chronicle titled “My Title IX Inquisition” that detailed the ludicrous process of the investigation and embarrassed Northwestern into throwing in the towel.

But wait — there’s more!

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Northwestern wasn’t done with Kipnis yet. Kipnis, already the author of several books, wrote another one about her Title IX experience, publishing “Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus” in April 2017. Can you guess what happened next? Sure you can! Just guess the most absurd possible thing Northwestern could do in response to the book.

That’s right: Northwestern launched another bogus Title IX investigation into Kipnis for the offense of writing a book criticizing the events of two years prior, when Northwestern launched a bogus investigation into Kipnis for criticizing the Title IX investigation process. Harvard Law School Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen broke the news in a New Yorker essay titled “Laura Kipnis’s Endless Trial by Title IX.” The title of Gersen’s essay itself makes a critical point: while Kipnis was ultimately cleared in all of these Title IX investigations, the “endless trial” enabled by the process was itself more than enough to punish the outspoken and chill the speech of those who don’t feel they can afford to speak out.

Title IX abuses spur needed reform

These kinds of abuses committed in the name of Title IX had, especially after the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, become too common and severe to ignore. Accused students filed over 700 lawsuits alleging procedural violations, resulting in over 200 rulings (and likely even more settlements) favorable to the rights of the accused. With courts traditionally reluctant even to consider second-guessing college disciplinary measures, these numbers were eye-opening. FIRE was challenging the letter itself in court when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, and the new administration made promises of reform.

In September 2017, then-Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos rescinded the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter, with the department ultimately going through the proper notice-and-comment process needed to implement unambiguous, legally binding regulations on how colleges administered Title IX.

That process lasted until 2020, when the new regulations finally went into effect, with an explicit acknowledgment that the Department of Education would apply the Supreme Court’s speech-protective standard for peer harassment in the education context, as well as new and badly needed guarantees of basic due process for those involved in Title IX proceedings, including:

• Proper notice of the allegations against the accused, including the identities of the parties and the date and location of the alleged incident;

• The right of all parties to inspect and review the gathered evidence, including exculpatory evidence;

• The right to cross-examine all parties and witnesses (through an advisor);

• The right to an advisor of one’s choice, who may be a lawyer;

• The right to a live hearing with a fact-finder who is not also the “prosecutor”;

• The right to a written finding, and to appeal that finding.

These are the very rudiments of a fair hearing that were missing from Title IX adjudications for decades, and the changes received heartening cross-partisan support, including from federal appeals courts. Several courts had already found that constitutional due process required institutions to provide some of these procedural protections, so it’s not as though adding them was unworkable. Additionally, the Los Angeles Times editorial board — hardly a Trump ally — opined in 2020 that the rules made “reasonable changes for the most part, curbing some of the excesses of the previous system.”

The Biden campaign promised to rescind those regulations if elected. It tried to keep that promise, restarting the regulatory process and promulgating new regulations that eliminated the guarantees of a live hearing, cross-examination, weakened the right to an advisor, and allowed the single-investigator model in which a single administrator could serve as prosecutor, judge, and jury. Thankfully, most of the changes were quickly blocked by multiple federal courts and have now been removed from the books.

The need for basic due process protections should be as nonpartisan an issue as one can imagine, given that nobody, Democrat, Republican, or otherwise, would choose to be subjected to a kangaroo court should they be the ones accused.

Cornell’s fraternity shutdown demonstrates once again that due process and expression are inextricably linked

Cornell’s latest move in the controversy almost seems intended to illustrate that free expression, right alongside due process, is imperiled when colleges make policy by reacting in the face of controversy rather than according to the principles that would best serve their students and the institution in the long run.

On Tuesday, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff announced that “All parties and social events in Interfraternity Council (IFC) houses at Cornell will be suspended for the remainder of the 2026-2027 academic year” to “provide time for a thorough review of fraternity life at Cornell to determine whether and how it can safely continue.” How this will be enforced is an open question, but at least some social events held by fraternities have an expressive component, such as the philanthropy events required by practically every national Greek organization (and, apparently, all of Cornell’s IFC fraternities).

What, if anything, constitutes a party or social event versus an expressive event? More to the point, when the university president decrees that “[t]here will be zero tolerance for violations of this directive,” would you take the risk of hosting any event or gathering, no matter how non-festive or expressive?

And who will bear the brunt of this ban? Five of the seven students accused are no longer at Cornell, including the two who were expelled, and the Chi Phi fraternity chapter at whose house the incident allegedly took place was shut down in 2024. Cornell’s punishment of the fraternity system therefore falls only on the members of the fraternities who were not involved in the incident, and which is flatly guaranteed to include a large number of individuals who can only be considered completely innocent of any wrongdoing. Many would not have even been present on campus in 2024.

That’s the reason guilt by association is so offensive to the American conception of justice: It guarantees that the innocent will be punished along with the guilty.

Nor is it defensible for Cornell to implement these restrictions in the name of “strengthening campus safety” almost two full years after it was made aware of the incident in question. If Cornell administrators truly believe the incident warranted a shutdown of all fraternity social events in the name of campus safety, waiting 23 months to do so while students remained in danger would be utterly unconscionable. Given that such a level of callousness seems unlikely, one can only conclude that the ban on social events is a move aimed at public relations rather than public safety, and one more certain to chill protected speech than it is to protect student safety.

The proverbial definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, yet that’s precisely what those advocating a return to a Title IX scheme that disregards both due process and freedom of expression propose to do. It won’t work, and it’s long past time for that failed experiment to be abandoned for good.

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When a congressman tried to stop her from recording a press conference, student journalist Cat Murphy stood her ground. The congressman, U.S. Rep. Andy Harris, mistakenly claimed that Maryland’s all-party consent law allowed him to ask Murphy to turn off her cameras, even going so far as to ask the police to intervene, but the law didn’t actually apply in that context. Murphy knew this and asserted her First Amendment right to continue documenting the event.

Surreptious recording can be a legally risky move. Every state except Vermont has at least one law that restricts wiretapping, eavesdropping, or recording private conversations. Likewise, so does the federal government. These statutes go by many names, like “wiretap statutes” and “intercepted communication laws.” Their goal is to protect private conversations from being secretly overheard or recorded.

When can student journalists record a conversation?

Recording laws differ based on who must give permission to record, but luckily, the nicknames for these laws largely speak for themselves.

As you might guess, in an all-party consent state (sometimes called a “two-party consent” state), each party to the conversation must give permission prior to recording. Meanwhile, a one-party consent statute requires only one participant to consent, even if the other party doesn’t know the recording is being made. (This could, however, raise some journalism ethics issues. In that case, we refer student journalists to the Society of Professional Journalists’ free ethics hotline for further guidance.)

In practice, being governed by a one-party consent law means that if you are a party in that conversation, you can legally give yourself “consent” and record even if that conversation is an interview. But if you aren’t a part of the conversation, you will still need permission from at least one participant in order to avoid legal pitfalls.

Most states and the federal government have one-party consent recording statutes. But 12 states are all-party consent states: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada (for phone calls and text messages, but not in-person conversations), New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Washington, and — as Rep. Harris made clear — Maryland.

So Rep. Harris wasn’t wrong when he called Maryland’s wiretapping statute a two-party consent law. His mistake was applying it in the context of a press conference.

Reasonable expectation of privacy required

Generally, for in-person conversations, recording statutes only require consent if the participants have a reasonable expectation of privacy. This is true of Maryland’s all-party consent law. Maryland courts determine whether that expectation exists through a two-pronged inquiry: first, whether the person with the privacy interest had an actual, subjective expectation of privacy; and second, whether that expectation of privacy was reasonable.

The interaction between Harris and Murphy occurred during a public press gaggle, in which a public official invited reporters to ask questions and multiple cameras were plainly recording. As a result, this conversation is not the type Maryland’s recording law was meant to protect, and Murphy was right to stand her ground.

Right, and courageous. Calls to involve law enforcement or invoke prosecution for protected newsgathering undermine the protection promised by the First Amendment. Murphy showed a spine of steel. Not only did she know her rights, she explained them to a government official. Student journalists unfortunately can’t expect government officials to always know — or uphold — their rights. It’s up to student journalists to know and assert them.

“[Murphy] recorded openly in a public space alongside other news outlets, and that is her legal right,” said Philip Merrill College of Journalism Dean Rafael Lorente. “I’m proud of how she handled herself in a difficult situation.” At a time when student journalists are facing administrative pressures from their institutions, it is gratifying to see a college administrator defend student journalism.

Student journalists make a difference for democracy by serving as watchdogs and holding power to account. Roadblocks are inevitable, but the best way student journalists can protect their rights is to know them thoroughly. That’s why FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative (SPFI) is at the forefront of censorship battles across the country, and is available to answer student press questions on its free 24/7 hotline.

Your ability to do journalism depends on your ability to know and articulate your rights. And when those in power push back, you can stand up like Cat Murphy to courageously assert those rights and continue asking the tough questions.

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Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

Today’s Dispatch covers a wide range of censorship efforts, from government takedown demands to social media platforms to a shocking death sentence in Saudi Arabia. But the lead-off story will look at what is, on its face, an absurd story of overpolicing in the United Kingdom. A politically active teen posted some comments mocking a local politician on Facebook — and then the police appeared at his home. It’s a story that has become all too common in the country. But behind it looms another threat to online speech. In a few months time, new rules will go into effect banning young people from using social media and requiring adults to verify their age with a passport or license.

The question now won’t just be whether police will come knocking at your door over what you said online, but under what conditions you can speak online in the first place.

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‘Rent boy’ and bunny ears jokes bring police to teen’s door

Fraser, a 15 year old boy from the UK’s West Midlands, is a vocal teenager. He campaigns for Reform UK and posts about politics on social media. And that’s where the trouble started. Four officers showed up at Fraser’s door one morning this August and told him he was under arrest — but didn’t explain exactly why, other than that it was “to do with social media.” Fraser was then fingerprinted, photographed for a mugshot, and questioned for a short time about his social media use and his knowledge of Tory councillor Simon Bennett from the Wolverhampton city council. Fraser’s Facebook posts about Bennett, it turns out, are presumably the reason why he was arrested in the first place, in what police said could be a potential “hate crime offence.”

Fraser had posted some insults about Bennett on Facebook, including an edited photo of Bennett wearing bunny ears with the caption: “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.” Fraser also complained about how Bennett dressed at meetings, and when he wore a suit instead of casual clothing Fraser posted that he was glad Bennett was “not looking like a rent boy.”

The “rent boy” dig is apparently what may have tipped the scales from wisecrack to crime. Bennett reported the posts to police, believing Fraser had potentially engaged in harassment and malicious communications against him.

“It was unpleasant and I was targeted by a child I had no way of dealing with,” Bennett said.

Fraser is now represented by the Free Speech Union but is still waiting to learn whether police intend to charge him with a crime.

The UK’s problems with free expression on the internet, particularly where young people are involved, is about to get even more complicated. The government remains intent on ensuring its upcoming under-16 social media ban — one that would keep teens like Fraser from engaging on social media entirely — isn’t flouted like Australia’s landmark legislation. So officials have now acknowledged that they may require “hard checks” in the form of passport or license verification to age-gate social media platforms. UK social media users concerned about a police knock at the door may soon have even more to worry about.

Speaking of long-running censorship issues: Police in the UK are still arresting peaceful protesters under anti-terror legislation for holding up signs in support of Palestine Action, a group currently fighting its government ban in court. Dozens were arrested late last month for holding signs expressing support for the group, including Massive Attack musician Robert Del Naja for his “I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION” placard.

Once again, Turkey ramps up internet censorship

Social media censorship is a favorite tool of the Turkish government, and they are wielding it once again. In recent weeks, government officials have ordered X to block at least 1,270 accounts, primarily from LGBTQ advocates, journalists, and academics. Meta has also blocked a number of accounts. T24, one of the oldest independent media outlets in the country with 1.9 million followers on X, earned a block order because it was “aimed at disrupting and weakening the Turkish family structure” and “would adversely affect the developmental process of young and underage individuals concerning sexual orientation and gender identity.” Human Rights Watch reports “[n]either X nor Meta have provided public explanations about their responses to the September-October censorship waves,” and that users are not even receiving explanations about the legal basis under which their accounts are being targeted.

The repression extends offline, too. Ali Tarakçı, one of the journalists censored on X, was also arrested for publicly spreading misleading information after speculating that an unnamed government minister would resign.

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More tech censorship in the news:

• The Philippine government temporarily banned Discord but lifted the restriction after the platform agreed to implement stricter measures on child safety and extremist content.

• Russian authorities recently enacted another crackdown on Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used to evade internet censorship, through methods including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, IP address blocks, phishing scams to employees at VPN service providers, and removal orders to app stores.

• Political cartoonist Satish Acharya’s Instagram account was temporarily blocked in India over years-old cartoons about the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

• The Indian government demanded app stores take down Bitchat, the Bluetooth-based messaging app co-founded by Jack Dorsey, for allowing “illegal” content and because the app’s decentralized nature would make it harder for government officials to target material and users.

New charges loom after French ‘public insult’ conviction

French writer and activist Dora Moutot was convicted for “public insult” and fined €4,754 earlier this year after stating in a 2022 talk show debate that she believed Marie Cau, a former French mayor and trans woman, is male. Moutot also said that “as women, we have no choice but to be wary of people with penises.” Finding her guilty, the judge said her words were an “abuse of freedom of expression warranting the imposition of a criminal penalty commensurate with the harm thus caused to the values protected by our democratic society.”

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls Reem Alsalem expressed concerns this month about Moutot’s prosecution and threats of violence against her, saying in statement, “Simply expressing views on sex, gender or the specific needs of women based on their sex should not constitute grounds for harassment, intimidation or sanction.”

Moutot is appealing, but says she is again facing allegations of “insult” charges, with another organization filing new complaints over Moutot and her colleague Marguerite Stern’s social media posts, blog, and YouTube channel.

Journalist’s views questioned at Israeli border

British journalist Secunder Kermani was temporarily denied entry and taken to an immigration detention facility after landing in Israel’s Ben-Gurion Airport to cover the country’s election season. Kermani was later granted entry after his employer, Channel 4, intervened, but he says that when he first landed border officials questioned him about his views, specifically asking if he believed Israel was “committing genocide.”

“Is this a new government policy to only allow certain journalists into the country? Even when they work for mainstream news organizations?,” Kermani said. He joins a group of reporters who have faced entry issues or had their travel credentials revoked.

Sedition, book bans, and…Tom Cruise?

If you’re seeking to understand how repressive Hong Kong has grown in recent years, this about sums it up: Outgoing national security police chief Andrew Kan said that just questioning the government’s lack of clarity on which books are banned is itself a “form of soft resistance.”

Even asking the government to spell out what you can’t say and read could itself be seditious.

And the sedition arrests have continued. Independent journalist Tang Ho-wing was arrested, and then released earlier this month, on sedition charges after sharing a video showing protesters marking the anniversary of a police crackdown on a 2019 protest. Then two people were arrested for “operating pages on various social media platforms and publishing seditious posts that incite hatred against the constitutional order of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.”

Meanwhile, Tom Cruise’s new film Digger was yanked from Hong Kong theaters ahead of its release, without an official reason given. Reports suggest that government censors pulled the film due to “sensitive dialogue” about a potential nuclear attack on China.

Migrant worker’s death sentence overturned

Blasphemy laws are still on the books in dozens of countries. A handful of those countries threaten the death penalty for blasphemers, and some do indeed sentence blasphemers to death. Thankfully, Sri Lankan migrant worker Sivarasa Anojan now will avoid that fate. Anojan made a Facebook comment critical of Islam in June after a video of a man kicking a dog set off a religious debate on social media. He soon apologized and deleted the comment, but the damage was done.

Anojan was initially sentenced to five years in prison and fined three million Saudi Riyals for blasphemy but prosecutors appealed the judgment, seeking a harsher punishment. They got their wish: A Saudi appeals court upgraded the sentence to death. Sri Lanka engaged in diplomatic appeals for mercy, and succeeded this week when Saudi Arabia’s Supreme Court overturned Anojan’s death sentence.

Whether he will remain imprisoned or receive a different sentence, however, remains unclear.

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The attempts are being initiated by actors across the political spectrum — with attempts from the right of the expression exceeding attempts from the left both last year (116 to 64) and this year (96 to 74).

Recent incidents include:

• Fenggang Yang, a professor of sociology and founding director of the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University, accepted an invitation to deliver the keynote address at the U.S.-China Catholic Association’s 2026 conference at the University of St. Thomas. After Chinese government officials reportedly objected to Yang’s participation, citing his past criticism of the Chinese government, Yang withdrew from speaking at the conference.

• The Chicago Thinker, a conservative student publication at the University of Chicago, reserved Breasted Hall through the university’s Turning Point USA chapter for a “fireside chat” with Tim Pool, host of Timcast IRL, and Jack Posobiec, a political activist and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer. According to the Thinker, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC), which manages the venue, confirmed the booking on Aug. 30 but canceled it nine days later. ISAC told organizers by email that the event “might be, as the terminology goes ‘controversial,’” and would require heightened security. University administrators reversed this decision.

• At Harvard University, the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance urged the Kennedy School to disinvite New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof after he wrote about claims of Israeli soldiers using dogs to rape Palestinian detainees. Harvard rejected the demand.

• Turning Point USA scheduled a “Freedom Built to Last: Honoring Charlie Kirk” memorial at Utah Valley University, featuring a number of prominent conservative speakers. Students for a Democratic Society at UVU opposed the event honoring Kirk and his political legacy. The university declined to cancel the event, and it proceeded on Sept. 10.

This year, there have also been six attempts targeting Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, the most of any individual. These attempts failed at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Yale University, Cornell University, and the University of Texas at Austin. Piker’s invitation to speak at the University of Washington was revoked because, according to university officials “the planning process did not meet the required rigor for university-hosted Speaker Series events.”

But the surge in deplatforming attempts is only part of the story. An even more troubling development is emerging: Government officials are increasingly joining campaigns to silence campus speakers, and colleges and universities are becoming much more likely to give in to their demands. This is troubling because, while students, members of the public, and government officials have every right to criticize speakers and demand that their invitations be withdrawn, government officials also wield additional powers that can turn an ordinary controversy over campus speech into something far more threatening.

From 1998 through 2022, politicians or government appointees were rarely involved in these campaigns, ranging from none to at most five per year. A record high of five was set in 2009. A new high of 19 was set in 2023, although 11 of these are speakers linked to a single event which happened before Oct. 7, an on-campus literature festival celebrating Palestinian culture at the University of Pennsylvania. Then in 2025, coinciding with the start of the second Trump administration, 33 deplatforming attempts involved politicians or government appointees. At this time, 2026 is keeping pace with 2025.

Almost all of the deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees since 2023 have come from the right of the expression. These attempts are far more common at state colleges and universities — roughly 70% of all attempts involving politicians since 2023. At first, colleges and universities mostly ignored these government pressure campaigns. In 2023 and 2024 just six of the 30 deplatforming attempts — one of every five — involving politicians or government appointees were successful. Over the past two years, 37 of the 59 deplatforming attempts involving politicians or government appointees were successful, or almost two out of every three. Government officials are clearly not the tip of the spear for every deplatforming attempt we have recorded over the past few years — but, given the power they wield, their increased involvement in them is concerning.

The rise in successful government-led deplatforming attempts coincides with a broader shift in the relationship between Washington and higher education. Since President Donald Trump’s return to office, colleges and universities have faced heightened federal scrutiny, including unlawful executive actions targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and with Department of Education investigations into alleged campus antisemitism. These developments do not necessarily explain every successful deplatforming campaign. But they raise an important question: Are colleges and universities becoming more willing to sacrifice expressive freedom when political pressure comes from officials who wield significant power over them?

The latest deplatforming record should concern anyone who values free expression on college campuses. Although the political identities of those seeking to silence speakers may change, the underlying threat remains the same: Giving in to demands that controversial voices be excluded from campus only encourages more such demands. And when those demands come from government officials, the stakes are even higher. Colleges and universities must resist political pressure to cancel invited speakers, regardless of whether that pressure comes from the left or the right. Otherwise, the record set in 2026 may not stand for long.

This essay was originally published on Sept. 11, 2026, on Jacob Mchangama’s Substack.

This is the third installment of my series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus, which is now live, freely searchable and even includes an audio player. The first installment examined Douglass’ defense of wartime dissent; the second, press freedom, defamation and journalistic ethics. Here I turn to the mobs that enforced slavery’s code of silence in the North and South — and to Douglass’ lifelong struggle against a form of censorship that survived emancipation. His insistence that using force to silence honest sentiments results in a “double wrong” remains a powerful message a year after the killing of Charlie Kirk and the wave of institutional and cultural censorship this political assassination unleashed.

The Sunday school mob

When Frederick Douglass learned how to read on the streets of Baltimore, the speeches in The Columbian Orator gave “tongue to many interesting thoughts” that previously were mere flashes which “died away for want of utterance.” Douglass was eager to help pass on this newfound power to enslaved children at an improvised Sunday school in rural Maryland. But Douglass’ stint as a teacher was swiftly shut down by his own master and two Methodist lay leaders:

we had scarcely got at work — good work, simply teaching a few colored children how to read the gospel of the Son of God — when in rushed a mob … who, armed with sticks and other missiles, drove us off, and commanded us never to meet for such a purpose again.

Douglass was told he was trying to be a Nat Turner — the leader of a bloody slave revolt in 1831 — and was warned that if he persisted, “I should get as many balls into me, as Nat did into him.” A fifteen-year-old boy teaching illiterate children to read and understand the word of God was treated as an instigator of violent insurrection and threatened with death.

Douglass later acknowledged the twisted logic behind this strict proscription:

The plea for this outrage was then, as it is now and at all times — the danger to good order. If the slaves learnt to read, they would learn something else, and something worse. The peace of slavery would be disturbed; slave rule would be endangered…. I do not dispute the soundness of the reasoning. It is perfectly sound; and, if slavery be right, Sabbath schools for teaching slaves to read the bible are wrong, and ought to be put down.

This experience did not deter Douglass from successfully starting another, more clandestine Sunday school later on. But the brutal crackdown on the unshackling of the minds of Black children likely helped shape his lifelong opposition to what we might call “The Slave Power’s Veto.” This Veto would keep haunting Douglass even after he escaped slavery and supporters purchased his freedom. What Douglass called “Mobocracy” would even survive slavery and obstruct the efforts to ensure freedom, equality and voting rights for the emancipated.

The veto reaches Yankeedom

Though slavery rested on racial hierarchy and was concentrated in the South, the Slave Power’s Veto crossed the color line, and its tentacles reached far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line and into Yankeedom.

In 1837, the white abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejoy was shot and killed while defending his printing press against a mob in Alton, Illinois. Two years earlier, the white theological student Amos Dresser had received twenty lashes on his bare back in Nashville, Tennessee, for possessing abolitionist literature and allegedly circulating it. A self-appointed vigilance committee ordered the whipping even though Dresser had violated no law. According to the local newspaper the Nashville Republican, Dresser should be grateful for this extrajudicial whipping, since only “the prudence and firmness of the Committee” had saved Dresser’s life from a lynch mob. That same year, Douglass’ future friend and mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his waist. In May 1838, the white abolitionist Angelina Grimké addressed an audience in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Hall as a mob hurled stones through its windows. The very next day, a mob burned the hall down.

In August 1845, a mob seized the printing press of the antislavery editor Cassius M. Clay in Lexington, Kentucky. Douglass repeatedly invoked these attacks to expose the Slave Power’s reach. He could think of “no occurrence of mobocratic violence against the anti-slavery cause which sent such a chill over my hopes” as the seizure of Clay’s press, which, operating in a slaveholding state, had been “a star shining in darkness, beaming hope to the almost despairing bondman.” But, he despaired, “the mob has triumphed, and the star apparently gone out.”

The mobs that Douglass faced down in person used methods of intimidation that ranged from heckling to violence. In 1842, The Liberator reported Douglass condemning racial prejudice for “exciting mobs against the colored people” and “preventing them from taking their places in society as equal members.” The Nantucket convention at which he spoke had itself faced people throwing brickbats and other missiles. In 1843, an abolitionist meeting in Pendleton, Indiana, nearly cost Douglass his life. A frenzied mob ordered the speakers to “be silent,” tore down their platform and attacked them. Douglass fought back with a stick before being beaten unconscious, only to be saved by an intervening friend. Douglass’ broken right hand never fully recovered.

Salt-water mobocrats

Mobs attempted to prevent Douglass from speaking not only in churches, assembly halls and outdoor meetings but even on the Atlantic, where he was confronted with the Slave Power’s Veto. In 1845, Douglass traveled to Britain on the steamship Cambria. American passengers threatened to throw Douglass overboard when he attempted to deliver an invited lecture on slavery. The captain’s threat to put the “salt-water mobocrats” in irons brought them to order.

The attack also demonstrated how suppression could backfire. The controversy was widely reported in the British press, which was much more hostile to slavery than its American counterpart. The Cambria affair introduced Douglass to a sympathetic British public eager to hear the man whom Americans had tried to silence. As we saw in the previous installment, his enemies sometimes became unwitting publicists for his cause. In a subsequent letter to the newspaper editor Thurlow Weed, Douglass exposed the double standard:

But then, it will be said, the subject of slavery is not open to discussion. Who say so? The very men who are continually speaking and writing in its favor.

The passengers had a right to ask about slavery, Douglass insisted, and he had a corresponding right to answer “so as to be understood by those who wished to hear.” Offended slaveholders could not extinguish either right.

In Britain, Douglass used his growing fame to expose how slavery corroded American liberty. Speaking in Paisley, Scotland, in 1846, he described the Northern states as “the tools of slaveholders.” A visitor from a free state could be “hung at the first lamp post” for proclaiming human equality in the South.

Yet abolitionists, quick to adopt modern communications technology, were making headway. More than a hundred newspapers now spread their doctrines, and speakers previously denied a meeting hall could take their arguments into the statehouse. Douglass and fellow abolitionists were once shunned by civil society, but “now we can hold meetings with men standing round to protect us.”

In Troy in 1855, Douglass placed “the suppression of all anti-slavery discussion” first among the Slave Power’s objectives. Its determination to silence opponents amounted to an admission of guilt: “Innocence has nothing to fear from discussion.”

The following year, in Rochester, he explained why free expression posed such a threat. Slaveholders understood that “the slave cannot be safely chained while the lips of freemen are unlocked.” Laws against abolitionist speech were reinforced by a public intolerance ready to erupt into violence:

Look at the whole South. You have only to drop a word against slavery, to set a whole community in a blaze, and bring down upon you the violence of the mob.

Free speech for an enemy

As in the previous installments, the harder test is whether Douglass extended his principles to his enemies. Did an antislavery crowd get a pass when it silenced a defender of human bondage?

Douglass’ defense of free speech extended to one of slavery’s most powerful political allies. In an October 1854 speech in Chicago, he addressed the recent shouting down of Senator Stephen A. Douglas (no relation and no ally), the architect of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. But before considering the senator’s grievances, Douglass described the people excluded from his promises of “Popular Sovereignty”:

Every right of human nature, as such, is denied them — they are dumb in their chains! To utter one groan, or scream, for freedom in the presence of the Southern advocate of Popular Sovereignty, is to bring down the frightful lash upon their quivering flesh. I know this suffering people; I am acquainted with their sorrows; I am one with them in experience; I have felt the lash of the slave driver, and stand up here with all the bitter recollections of its horrors vividly upon me.

This experience gave Douglass a particular obligation to exercise the freedom denied to those still enslaved:

There are special reasons, therefore, why I should speak and speak freely. The right of speech is a very precious one, especially to the oppressed.

He then turned to the senator’s wounded feelings:

I understand that Mr. Douglas regards himself as the most abused man in the United States, and that the greatest outrage ever committed upon him, was in the case in which your indignation raised your voices so high that his could not be heard. No personal violence, as I understand, was offered him. It seems to have been a trial of vocal powers between the individual and the multitude; as might have been expected, the voice of one man was not equal in volume to the voice of five hundred.

The mockery came with an explicit reaffirmation of principle:

I do not approve it; I am for free speech as well as for freemen and free soil.

Douglass recognized the senator’s right to speak while putting the interference he had suffered in perspective. Being drowned out by nonviolent political opponents scarcely compared with the enforced silence of millions living under the lash. Yet the senator had no problem with systematic suppression when slavery was decided in elections where those wielding the whip cast ballots but those being whipped did not. Douglass could condemn the crowd’s conduct and ridicule the senator’s self-pity in the same breath. Indeed, he hoped the experience might teach the senator to respect the rights of those whose oppression he defended.

Douglass’ opposition to the heckler’s veto did not demand reverential silence from the audience. In 1862, Douglass gave a speech that viciously attacked both President Lincoln’s and General McClellan’s war efforts. A member of the audience got so vocally upset at Douglass’ remarks that he was about to be expelled and “handled roughly,” yet Douglass intervened and insisted that his critic be “heard patiently by the audience.” In “Self-Made Men,” Douglass observed that speakers could be as indebted “to the men who hiss, as to those who applaud.” Hostility could sharpen arguments and amplify a speaker’s message. Read alongside his denunciations of suppression, this suggests a distinction between opposition that leaves room for an answer and disruption that prevents a hearing altogether. Once again, Douglass resisted Milton’s Curse — free speech for me, but not for thee — while retaining the moral high ground and conceding nothing of his powerful argument.

A mob of gentlemen

On December 3, 1860, abolitionists gathered at Boston’s Tremont Temple to commemorate John Brown and discuss how slavery could be abolished. A hostile crowd of Bostonians took over the meeting, which devolved into a fight in which Douglass gave as good as he received. Instead of protecting the meeting against the mob, the mayor ordered its dispersal.

Six days later, Douglass delivered his famous speech, “A Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” at the city’s Music Hall and aimed an accusatory finger at the Athens of America. Here was a city proud of its revolutionary heritage and supposed devotion to liberty. Yet the meeting had been captured by a “mob of gentlemen” — men who proclaimed their respect for law and order while trampling the rights of their opponents:

Theirs was the law of slavery. The law of free speech and the law for the protection of public meetings they trampled under foot, while they greatly magnified the law of slavery.

Douglass also confronted the more sympathetic observers who condemned the mob but regretted the meeting’s timing and choice of participants. Their advice would make the exercise of a right depend on the tolerance of those threatening it. Douglass insisted that “the time to assert a right is the time when the right itself is called in question.”

The protection of a handful of eminent speakers could not vindicate Boston’s freedom. The test was whether the same protection extended to the poor, the unpopular and the despised:

There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up or however humble, however young or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.

And the injury extended beyond the person on the platform:

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

This was the principle Douglass had defended aboard the Cambria, now expressed with exceptional clarity. A willing audience had rights of its own. The mob could not claim to speak for everyone present simply because it possessed the determination or physical force to overpower them.

As in his account of press freedom, Douglass’ understanding of free speech demanded more than the absence of censorship and suppression. It required institutions and a civic commitment capable of protecting the actual exchange of ideas in the public sphere. Officials who surrendered a meeting to its attackers helped make intimidation an effective instrument of censorship.

The segregationist’s veto

Emancipation would abolish the slaveholder’s legal ownership of other human beings. It would not abolish the power to silence them. In 1871, Douglass wrote an editorial titled “Liberty of Speech South,” asserting that nothing had aroused the North’s “hatred” against slavery more than the South’s “absolute denial of the freedom of speech” on this topic. Yet even after defeat, Douglass claimed, Southern recalcitrants had “murdered not less than ten thousand loyal men” for exercising this freedom. His verdict on what was supposed to be a triumphant status quo was damning:

until a man can express his opinion upon all possible subjects as freely and as safely at the South as he does at the North […] freedom is the merest farce, and reconstruction a failure.

By 1878, Douglass lamented that “freedom of speech and of the ballot have for the present fallen before the shot-guns of the South.” The Slave Power’s Veto was becoming the Segregationist’s Veto: political violence could defeat the equal protection of rights and franchise that constitutional amendments had formally secured.

In “Lynch Law in the South” (1892), Douglass again looked beyond the men carrying out the violence. The “men who break open jails and with bloody hands destroy human life” acted on the public sentiment of the South created by “wealth and respectability, by the press and the pulpit.” The resemblance to Boston’s “mob of gentlemen” was unmistakable. Men did not have to wield a weapon themselves to help determine whose voice could safely be heard, when they could depend on the “ignorant mob” to do it for them with the promise of impunity from the state and approval from the public.

Two years later, in “Lessons of the Hour,” Douglass described the finality of the mob’s censorship:

When the will of the mob has been accomplished, when its thirst for blood has been quenched, when its victim is speechless, silent and dead, his mobocratic accusers and murderers of course have the ear of the world all to themselves, and the world generally approves their verdict.

More than sixty years separated this indictment from the dispersal of Douglass’ Sunday school. Progress had been made, but the dreams of true freedom and equality had yet to be realized. Despite Douglass’ herculean efforts, the mob’s infliction of the Double Wrong continued to sustain racial domination.

The veto’s afterlife

Fortunately, the Slave Power’s Veto has been soundly defeated; shotguns no longer silence dissent in the South, nor do Southern sensibilities padlock lips in the North. Nonetheless, modern America has yet to fully internalize Douglass’ vision of a public sphere that cherishes free speech and cultivates tolerance of dissent as civic virtues.

A year ago, the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while answering student questions at Utah Valley University. The reaction to Kirk’s assassination was not to double down on free speech. Instead, it unleashed a “wave of censorship” at many American colleges, with faculty sanctioned for Kirk-related comments and students disciplined for what they posted. This points to a deeper problem of intolerance. According to FIRE’s most recent College Free Speech Rankings, 30% of college students say using violence is acceptable to prevent controversial campus speakers in some instances, 69% think shouting down a speaker can be justified, and 50% think blocking other students from attending a speech on campus can be justified. For the second year running, a majority of students opposed allowing each of six hypothetical controversial speakers on campus — three liberal and three conservative. Both sides have red lines they believe should be off limits, and both draw them from their own ideological and moral commitments.

College campuses are not the only arena where Mobocracy still lingers. Three months before Kirk’s murder, in June 2025, Minnesota’s former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot dead in their home by a gunman specifically targeting Democratic lawmakers. In 2022, Salman Rushdie was stabbed on stage at Chautauqua by a religious fanatic offended by Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Clearly, even today many are tempted to use force to compel fellow citizens to hide their honest sentiments. That was exactly what Douglass learned at fifteen, when his Sunday school was violently dispersed. Douglass saw clearly that the answer to violent intolerance was not to silence opponents in turn, but to preach and practice the principle of free speech. We would do well to follow his example today.

Flock Safety sells surveillance cameras that track the public’s movements. But apparently, the company doesn’t want you to know how extensive its surveillance apparatus is or to hear criticism about it — and the company will engage in intimidation to keep it that way.

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The latest example of Flock’s censorial methods occurred last month when it targeted Joshua Michael, a cybersecurity researcher who founded Nexanet, with a trademark complaint and a cease-and-desist letter. In November 2025, Michael discovered a vulnerability in Flock’s website that he says allowed him to retrieve extensive information about the company’s nationwide surveillance network without detection.

After discovering the flaw, Michael reported it to Flock, telling the company the data was publicly available and could be found without any hacking. A few days later, after Michael followed up twice, Flock responded: “Thank you for the findings. We are internally triaging them and will reach back out with next steps soon.”

Michael never heard from Flock again until he made his findings known. On Sept. 23, Michael published the Flock Surveillance Map. As part of his research, Michael noted it revealed “camera coverage around 22 sensitive military, intelligence, federal, and defense sites.” As he wrote in an Instagram post from early October: “My thesis is that a company holding the movements of nearly every American, yet unable to detect its own data leaving, is a national security threat, because a foreign adversary will never publish a paper to tip them off.”

Aside from Michael’s national security concerns, the data he published directly contradicted the number of automatic license plate cameras (ALPRs) Flock has publicly stated were in circulation. According to the data Michael retrieved, Flock has more than 300,000 devices in its network, including over 170,000 cameras as well as 27,000 acoustic devices. Over the summer, Flock told The Washington Post that its surveillance network had over 120,000 cameras.

On Sept. 24, Doppel, Flock’s brand protection vendor, requested “the immediate removal” of Michael’s “infringing site.” Interestingly, Flock’s initial complaint didn’t accuse Michael of illegally accessing the data. Instead, Flock’s “authorized agent” says Michael’s site — flocksurveillance.org — “is using trademark FLOCK SAFETY without authorization,” adding that “unauthorized use of their trademark may cause customer confusion / harm.”

Flock’s attorney followed up the next day with a cease-and-desist demand, now concentrating on Michael’s alleged “unauthorized access to computer systems and data associated with Flock.” This time, there was no mention of a trademark violation, a tell-tale indication Flock’s initial trademark complaint was a retaliatory response to Michael’s journalism.

On one level, the pivot makes sense because the alleged trademark violation could well be met with skepticism by the courts. A trademark does two things at once: It protects the holder from unsavory competitors profiting off of their good name, and it signals to consumers they’re buying from the correct provider.

But Michael’s website has no commercial aspect to it. Moreover, trademark law also makes an exception for criticism and news reporting, and Michael’s site was clearly addressing a matter of growing and bipartisan public concern. Nor can Flock claim a reasonable person could believe Michael’s site had any affiliation with the company because when you access it, a disclaimer pops up immediately telling the visitor it is “not affiliated with or endorsed by Flock Safety, Flock Group, Inc., or their products” and that “Flock names and marks belong to their respective owners and are used only to identify the research subject.”

This isn’t the first time Flock has used trademark claims to try and silence its critics. In January 2025, Flock sent Will Freeman a cease-and-desist letter over his crowdsourced mapping project, DeFlock, alleging it diluted Flock’s trademark. The rationale behind Freeman’s project is plainly an act of criticism. According to Freeman, DeFlock’s objective is to “shine a light on the widespread use of ALPR technology, raise awareness about the threat it poses to personal privacy and civil liberties, and empower the public to take action.”

Freeman turned to the Electronic Frontier Foundation to represent him. The tech civil liberties group sent a letter rejecting Flock’s demand. “Your claims of dilution by blurring and/or tarnishment fail at the threshold, without even needing to address why dilution is unlikely,” wrote Cara L. Gagliano, a senior staff attorney at EFF. “Federal anti-dilution law includes express carve-outs for any noncommercial use of a mark and for any use in connection with criticizing or commenting on the mark owner or its products.”

After Gagliano sent the response, neither she nor Freeman ever heard from Flock again. “In my experience,” she told me “that’s the most common outcome when we respond to a weak trademark or copyright claim for a client.”

Flock’s shenanigans involving Michael and Freeman in some ways call to mind strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs. In a SLAPP, the plaintiff isn’t primarily worried about winning the lawsuit. Instead, the accuser’s legal threat is meant to intimidate the recipient into silence, and if a lawsuit is actually brought, punish the defendant through time-consuming, stressful, and expensive litigation. That’s why 40 states and the District of Columbia have anti-SLAPP laws to deter this kind of lawfare.

In his X post revealing Flock’s trademark complaint, Michael said he “will not back down.” As of right now, his Flock Surveillance Map is still up. Check out the map and teach Flock about the Streisand Effect — because the things you try to bury have a way of coming back to haunt you.

“The First Amendment is very plain in its wording and its meaning.”

— Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro, on the company’s court fight with the FCC

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Minnesota school board silences parents

Blake and Katy DeMarais were repeatedly cut off during Foley Public School Board meetings in Minnesota for mentioning school employees by name or even job title while raising concerns about their nonverbal child’s special education services. But as Matthew Harwood writes:

There’s a good reason that school staff names and titles are public. The community has the right to know how their tax dollars are being spent and whether the public servants they pay are doing their jobs effectively, ethically, and constitutionally. How can parents in Foley public schools know if the adults in charge of their kids’ education are doing their jobs if nobody can criticize them by name or even mention their titles?

Update: Blogger found guilty over Shrek dick pic

An Ohio political blogger who sent an image of Shrek’s penis to a state senator was found guilty of telecommunications harassment today. Aaron Terr explains:

This isn’t all that surprising given the breadth of the Ohio statute under which he was was charged. The Rooster should appeal and challenge the law’s constitutionality. The First Amendment protects the right to criticize government officials, even in crude or vulgar terms. If a single electronic communication that annoys or alarms the recipient can amount to criminal harassment, that’s bad news for a lot of social media users!

Below the fold

• A federal judge in D.C. heard Disney’s request to block the FCC’s early review of eight ABC station licenses, but didn’t rule.

• FIRE sued the Los Angeles City Council over its ban of the words “cunt” and “nigger” during public comment.

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The long view

Jacob Mchangama continues his examination of Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, this time asking how the abolitionist responded to lies and personal attacks. Douglass endured decades of racist slurs, smears, and false accusations, yet appears to have threatened legal action for defamation only once. He believed newspapers had an ethical duty to let people answer attacks in the same pages where they appeared. Mchangama explains that Douglass overwhelmingly preferred counterspeech to lawsuits, and largely practiced what he preached — even when his critics turned his own printing press against him.

Podcasts

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

Constitutional law and environmental law scholars Jonathan Adler and Donald Kochan join to discuss the first Supreme Court case of the new term, Suncor v. Boulder, which explores whether states, cities, and counties can sue fossil fuel producers for the harms caused by climate change.

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech — hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

Nico talks with filmmaker Jim Epstein and journalist Germania Rodríguez Poleo about how Venezuela went from democracy to dictatorship. Their discussion centers on Epstein’s new documentary, Escaping Venezuela, which follows Carlos Mora, a man imprisoned and tortured for helping dissidents flee to Colombia. They trace how Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro dismantled press freedom, punished dissent, and tightened their grip on power. The episode explores how authoritarianism takes hold gradually — and what it would take to restore democracy in Venezuela.

Required reading

In The Washington Post, Andrew Doyle argues that Britain’s counterterrorism program has become a potential censorship tool after comedian John Cleese was reported to Prevent, the British government program designed to stop people from becoming terrorists. Cleese was reported over his jokes and comments about Islam. Doyle says the complaint reflects a broader trend of treating controversial opinions as signs of extremism, blurring the line between offensive speech and genuine threats. He praises Cleese for mocking the complaint and argues that disagreements over religion, immigration, and culture should be settled through open debate, not government intervention.

Today in history with

On Oct. 21, 1998, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) was passed, requiring commercial distributors of “material harmful to minors” to block minors from their sites. “Harmful to minors” followed the Supreme Court’s three-part Miller test for obscenity, from Miller v. California, which says something is obscene only if regular people find it “prurient,” offensively sexual, and clearly without serious value. Multiple cases challenged COPA, saying it restricted adults’ rights, was hard to enforce, and that local community standards don’t fit the borderless internet. In 2009, the Supreme Court let the lower court’s block stand by refusing to hear the appeal, and COPA ended.

By the numbers

PEN America’s new index counted 11,982 school book bans in the 2025-26 school year, the highest since it began tracking in 2021. Texas led with more than 8,100 after the state’s SB 13 took effect, per PEN’s press release. PEN says 72% of the districts it tracked can attribute bans to state legislation. Last year’s count was 6,870.

This essay was originally published on Oct. 6, 2026, on Reason.

A local school board in Minnesota has taken censorship to absurd heights.

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During the public comment period at Foley Public School Board meetings, concerned citizens are forbidden from saying not only the names of school staff and officials but even their titles. These revelations come from Blake and Katy DeMarais, concerned parents of a disabled and nonverbal special education student in the district. Over the summer, the parents complained that the district was failing to provide educational services to their son, only to be censored in a public meeting.

During the board’s June 22 meeting, Katy DeMarais opened her comment by stating she would like to speak about her family’s “experience with the special education director and district leadership.” According to a video posted by the DeMaraises, a board member’s voice then interrupts, telling Katy DeMarais that “I’ll have to stop you . . . because we’re not allowed to speak about people in the public meeting.” When Katy DeMarais proceeded to finish her public comment, she would verbally say “blank” when referencing the special education director.

Later in the same meeting, Blake DeMarais gave his own public comment, which was also recorded. In the video, Blake DeMarais begins reading an email sent to them by the district’s superintendent, but when he says nothing more than “superintendent,” he gets shut down too. “Blake,” the voice intones, “you’re done. You can’t talk about the superintendent. We already addressed this.”

Nearly two months later, it happened again at an August 17 meeting. Visibly upset, Blake DeMarais reads an email from the district’s lawyer. Quoting the email, he mentions “Superintendent Posthumus” and is immediately silenced. “Blake, I need you to stop at this point,” a voice interrupts. “When you start talking about staff members, that’s when we have to stop.”

“Do you know what viewpoint discrimination is?” Blake DeMarais asks. “That’s what you’re doing to me right now.”

He’s right, of course, but the absurdity only gets worse: The board is also violating its own policy and state law. According to the policy adopted by the board in August 2024, personnel data that is public information includes both the name of the employee and their job title. It also includes a slew of other information, such as “actual gross salary” and “the existence and status of any complaints or charges against the employee, regardless of whether the complaint or charge resulted in a disciplinary action.” The district’s own policy tracks Minnesota law, which also states that a government employee’s name and job title are public data.

Regardless of what district policy or Minnesota law says, the Foley school board trampled on the DeMaraises’ First Amendment rights. When a school board opens a meeting to public comment, it can’t censor its constituents for criticizing school staff, much less simply naming them or mentioning their titles. A government body can constitutionally restrict some speech during a public comment period, such as limiting comment to a maximum allotted time or ensuring it’s on topic, but all those restrictions must be reasonable and viewpoint neutral. In its treatment of the DeMaraises, the Foley Public School Board has hit the trifecta, violating its own policy, state law, and the First Amendment.

There’s a good reason that school staff names and titles are public. The community has the right to know how their tax dollars are being spent and whether the public servants they pay are doing their jobs effectively, ethically, and constitutionally. How can parents in Foley public schools know if the adults in charge of their kids’ education are doing their jobs if nobody can criticize them by name or even mention their titles?

The DeMaraises won’t be silenced. During the last school board meeting in September, Katy DeMarais stepped up to the microphone once again to advocate for her son and reminded the board members of their duty to the families they serve.

“Parents have a right to speak about their experiences — the good, the bad, and everything in between,” she said. “Advocacy is not harassment.”

This is the second in a series on Frederick Douglass’ free speech philosophy, drawn from the Frederick Douglass Free Speech Corpus, a growing collection of close to two hundred speeches, editorials, letters and interviews I’m currently curating. In Part 1, I found that during the Civil War, Douglass defended the right to attack Lincoln and cheer for Jefferson Davis, an astonishing position for a man who had given his life to a cause that only Union victory could secure and that the Confederacy waged all-out war to prevent.

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This installment takes up another test: What did Douglass do when what was at stake was not sedition or criticism of the government but lies and attacks aimed at himself? It is a test that has undone many a great champion of free expression, in what I’ve called Milton’s Curse: free speech for me, but not for thee. Douglass spent half a century embroiled in often bitter and deeply personal wars of words. Yet as far as I can tell, he initiated legal action for defamation only once.

Frederick Douglass was a frequent target of vilification and smears — not to mention hostile mobs, stones and rotten eggs. His enemies — and sometimes even erstwhile allies — used press and pulpit to counter the growing influence of his oratorical genius and editorial prowess. Douglass’ primary weapon consisted of words, but what to do when opponents turned this weapon against him? Was counterspeech a sufficient remedy, or should legal redress also be an option? What rules, legal or moral, should guide newspaper editors with power to shape public opinion? And as Douglass became an influential speaker, editor and publisher himself, did he practice what he preached?

Douglass the defamed

“Nigger” and other racial epithets were routinely hurled at Douglass. But far more damaging than crude racist attacks were various allegations of sexual depravity, of lying about his life story, of being a paid anti-American agitator and of being a cowardly co-conspirator in the attack on Harper’s Ferry.

In August 1841, Douglass gave a speech at Nantucket’s Atheneum that made him an immediate sensation in abolitionist circles and launched his career as a peripatetic orator and relentless freedom fighter. William Lloyd Garrison vividly described Douglass’ impact:

I shall never forget his first speech at the convention — the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind — the powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory . . . I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment.

The enthusiastic response to Douglass’ speeches prompted the idea for his first autobiography, “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” (1845), which in turn transformed Douglass into an international celebrity. But as his fame increased, so did the scrutiny, criticism and hostility he faced.

In late 1845, the Delaware Republican published a letter — “Falsehood Refuted” — from an A.C.C. Thompson who had lived in Maryland and knew the “runaway slave” (Douglass). Thompson insisted that the Narrative was a “catalogue of lies” composed by “some evil designed person or persons” to “excite the indignation of public opinion against the slaveholders of the South.” Thompson also defended Douglass’ previous owners and a brutal overseer named in the Narrative, claiming that he was “intimately acquainted with most of the gentlemen whose characters are so shamefully traduced.”

But Douglass turned Thompson’s damning accusations into a victory. He wrote a sarcastic reply in Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Douglass begged Thompson “to accept my thanks for his full, free and unsolicited testimony, in regard to my identity,” since the article had “forever” settled the question of whether Douglass had truly been a slave or was a fictitious character of abolitionist propaganda. He continued:

I am greatly indebted to you, sir, for silencing those truly prejudicial insinuations . . . You have done a piece of anti-slavery work, which no anti-slaveryman could do.

His reply also contained the initial contours of a Douglassian ethical framework necessary for press freedom to serve its proper function. Douglass submitted his response to The Liberator expecting the Delaware Republican to refuse him a rejoinder:

In any country but the United States, I might hope to get a hearing through the columns of the paper in which I was attacked. But this would be inconsistent with American usage and magnanimity. It would be folly to expect such a hearing. They might possibly advertise me as a runaway slave, and share the reward of my apprehension; but on no other condition would they allow my reply a place in their columns.

To Douglass, the proper response to attacks on reputation and ideas was reciprocal counterspeech. Ideally, the venue of attack would provide the target equal access to respond. When reciprocity was denied, press freedom provided a corrective mechanism. Media pluralism increased the chances that a fair-minded newspaper would give voice to those denied a right of reply elsewhere.

The poison and its antidote

Douglass would get plenty of chances to wrestle with the functioning of this framework during his extensive stay in Great Britain and Ireland from 1845–47, where he thundered against slavery and its apologists.

Douglass repeatedly attacked the recently established Free Church of Scotland for its fundraising efforts among Presbyterian slaveholders in the American South. Douglass popularized the slogan “Send Back the Money” among Scots outraged that their church was soliciting funds from the “man-stealing, cradle-robbing, and woman-whipping monster[s]” whom Douglass vividly portrayed in his speeches.

The Northern Warder, a Free Church–friendly newspaper, fought back against Douglass’ moral crusade. It accused Douglass and fellow critics of being “foul-mouthed clamourers” and “hired bravoes from the ranks of the American abolitionists” who spread “impieties” and “falsehood and slander” against the Free Church and its ministers.

In his speech “Charges and Defense of the Free Church,” delivered in Dundee on March 10, 1846, Douglass told the audience that he had fully expected a “desperate” attempt to counter his message through “the grossest misrepresentations and the darkest insinuations.” He would not have “uttered a single word of complaint” if the Northern Warder had resorted to such measures in a free and open contest. But instead, he asserted, the editor “assailed our character, impeached our motives, perverted our arguments, and peremptorily refused to permit us a single word of reply.”

Douglass then expanded on his previous press ethics sketch:

In America, and I believe in this country, it is understood as being but common fairness, when either a single individual or a body of individuals are attacked in their opinions or conduct in the columns of a newspaper, that he or they have an opportunity of reply through the same columns, so that the cup containing the poison, or supposed poison, may also contain its antidote. This in America is established etiquette; it is also common fairness and common justice. It is only where this etiquette is established in a community that it can be said to have any of the advantages of a public press, that it becomes the palladium of liberty as well as of purity. But let the opposite principle prevail, and it is a curse rather than a blessing. No man is safe. He may be pierced through with a thousand poisoned weapons, and be totally without the means of defence or redress. An adroit editor may keep within the letter of the law and break its spirit in every line. Such is the present case. We have not been allowed a single word of reply.

Note that just months earlier, Douglass had written that in America it would be “folly” to expect a right to reply in the same newspaper where he was attacked. Now he described the right of reply as an “established etiquette” in the U.S. He may simply have meant that reciprocity in a pro-slavery Southern newspaper was futile for a runaway slave (after all, most Southern states strictly prohibited abolitionist writings), and that the established etiquette operated with a dividing line based on color.

Whatever the reason for this seeming discrepancy, the quoted passage showed Douglass’ keen awareness that the twin freedoms of the press and speech functioned differently in practice. Press freedom was exercised by the few who had the means to acquire and operate a printing press, providing editors and publishers outsized power to shape public opinion. Restraining this concentration of power demanded responsibility and a commitment to ethical standards preventing the press from perverting the principles which it was meant to serve. As such, Douglass clearly acknowledged that words — however indispensable for realizing universal human freedom — could also be weaponized to frustrate these ideals and harm those without access to the reach that print provided.

But crucially, Douglass’ primary remedy for the violation of press ethics was not a resort to the law but rather a reliance on a pluralistic and decentralized press and active civil society. When the Northern Warder refused Douglass a right of reply, the Dundee Courier wrote a detailed article rebutting the claims of the Northern Warder and supporting Douglass, who in turn praised the Courier’s editor for “expos[ing] the sophistries and denounc[ing] the base insinuations.” The combination of the Courier’s coverage and his speech at the raucous meeting in Dundee “was sufficient answer to all the Warder’s indirect slander.”

The New-York Tribune also republished a Douglass article from The Liberator to counter coverage in hostile New York newspapers accusing him of being a “glib-tongued scoundrel” who was “running a muck in greedy-eared Britain against America, its people, its institutions, and even against its peace.” In a private letter thanking the Tribune’s editor, Douglass wrote: “Of the low and vulgar epithets applied to me by the Express, very little need be said. I am used to them. Their force is lost upon me, in the frequency of their application.” What really mattered to him was the opportunity to explain to readers that “the best friend of a nation is he who most faithfully rebukes her for her sins — and he her worst enemy who, under the specious and popular garb of patriotism, seeks to excuse, palliate or defend them.”

After Douglass spoke at a temperance convention in London, the Reverend Samuel Hanson Cox wrote an article in the New-York Evangelist accusing Douglass of being a paid “agitator” who “denounce[d] America” as part of an abolitionist plot to “re-kindle, on both sides of the Atlantic, the flames of national exasperation and war.” Douglass once again relied on the Liberator to respond.

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Douglass conceded that answering every hostile accusation displayed “a ridiculous sensibility to the good or evil opinions of men” and wasted precious “thought, time and strength,” particularly when the attacks came from “those who hate me.” But a rebuttal was required when it involved defending “great and vital principles, the vindication of which is essential to the triumph of righteousness throughout the world.”

The limits of counterspeech

Soon the limits of Douglass’ commitment to counterspeech would be severely tested. His criticism of the Free Church had caused many Presbyterians to rebel and join the growing chorus of “Send Back the Money.” When Douglass traveled to Belfast to persuade local Presbyterians to demand the return of slavers’ money, Free Church supporters decided to fight back and fight ugly. They cleverly appropriated the viral abolitionist campaign with leaflets shouting “Send Back the Nigger.” But that was not all: The Irish-born American Free Church supporter Thomas Smyth circulated a rumor that Douglass had visited a brothel in Manchester. This was a highly damaging attack on Douglass’ character, calculated to invoke racist stereotypes and blacken his reputation as a person worthy of addressing white Christians as their equal. Douglass confessed that his “spirit was marred” by this “malignant slander,” and he instructed solicitors to initiate legal action against Smyth for defamation. Unable to substantiate his statements, Smyth felt compelled to write a letter expressing his “sincere regret” for the “unfounded” allegations. Douglass accepted the retraction and apology and insisted that the letter should first be published in Belfast, where Smyth had spread the falsehood.

Douglass had finally found the limits of free speech. Racial epithets and character assassination directed at his public life and opinions should be confronted in the court of public opinion. False and highly damaging allegations of fact directed at his private life might justify escalation to courts of law unless retracted. This was hardly a case of egregious hypocrisy. In fact, Douglass might have won a defamation lawsuit against Smyth even under the exacting standards of modern First Amendment doctrine.

From the sources I have identified, it appears that Smyth was the first and last person Douglass ever took legal steps against for defamation, despite a career that continued for almost five decades after Smyth’s retraction. This conclusion is consistent with Douglass biographer John Muller, who in 2022 wrote that he had “not yet come across a case where Frederick Douglass, Sr. filed suit against any journalist or newspaper.”

A press of his own

Despite the many attacks on his person, Douglass concluded that his British tour and the attention the controversies generated for him and his cause had been a net benefit. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass wrote that he was often “more indebted to my enemies than to my own skill” since a “man is sometimes made great, by the greatness of the abuse.” But the path to greatness depended almost wholly on having a forum and a receptive audience for counterspeech. This experience convinced Douglass that he needed a printing press of his own:

a tolerably well conducted press, in the hands of persons of the despised race . . . would prove a most powerful means of removing prejudice, and of awakening an interest in them.

Douglass’ entrepreneurial spirit was not appreciated by his backers among white American abolitionists, whose usual admiration turned to condescending dismissal:

My American friends looked at me with astonishment! ‘A wood-sawyer’ offering himself to the public as an editor! A slave, brought up in the very depths of ignorance, assuming to instruct the highly civilized people of the north in the principles of liberty, justice, and humanity!

With money from British supporters, Douglass overcame his self-doubt and defied the naysayers by launching The North Star in 1847. As editor and publisher, he was no longer reliant on the goodwill of other gatekeepers when spreading his abolitionist gospel in print. Douglass was now a gatekeeper and responsible for ensuring that The North Star complied with the demanding ethical framework he so frequently lambasted other publishers for violating.

The editor on trial

In 1849, The North Star became the venue for a heated and factional discussion among abolitionists divided on the issue of whether the Constitution was an instrument of slavery or a roadmap for emancipation.

Douglass promised to keep the North Star open to all sides of the argument and to be guided solely by the pursuit of truth: “The only truly consistent man is he who will, for the sake of being right today, contradict what he said wrong yesterday.”

These debates — especially with his friend and later financial supporter Gerrit Smith — helped persuade Douglass to abandon the Garrisonian view of the Constitution as inherently proslavery. The reversal caused a bitter rupture with his former allies and sparked an acrimonious war of words. In the following years, Garrison spread rumors that Douglass was having an affair with his white collaborator Julia Griffiths, who lived with Douglass and his wife. Much like the Smyth rumors in Belfast, these charges were aimed squarely at Douglass’ private life rather than his ideas. This raised a delicate strategic question: When would publicly answering internecine attacks do more harm to their common cause than the attacks themselves? Despite the rumors’ malicious nature, Douglass met them with furious denials from his pen and press, or strategic silence, rather than legal threats.

Douglass also faced another difficult test of his own editorial principles. Following a dispute over the proposal to distribute Bibles among enslaved people, he published a sharply personal attack on Henry Highland Garnet, who was preparing to tour Britain. Douglass questioned Garnet’s commitment to moral abolitionism, portrayed him as an advocate of violence and warned British supporters that Garnet represented only himself. Garnet replied that Douglass had “slandered and traduced” him and attempted to discredit his character before an audience important to them both. He further alleged that Douglass had previously withheld one of his letters because its opinions were unwelcome — the very charge Douglass had leveled at the Northern Warder in Dundee. He also portrayed Douglass as hostile to and jealous of other abolitionists whose prominence might threaten his own standing and fame. Yet Garnet acknowledged that Douglass had now given him “an opportunity to speak for myself, through the same medium.” Douglass honored that promise, printing the hostile reply in full under the headline “Calling Him Out, and He Comes.” Douglass allowed Garnet to pour his antidote into the same cup that had contained Douglass’ poison.

The North Star also served as the first line of defense when Douglass was on the receiving end of attacks from other newspapers that didn’t share the same ethical commitment to reciprocity as Douglass. In 1850, Douglass was physically attacked while walking through New York with white friends, including women. One press account falsely portrayed him as deliberately provoking the public by walking down Broadway with two white women on his arms and claimed that the women subsequently placed themselves under the protection of his assailants. According to Douglass’ account, a group of men surrounded the party, shouted “coarse and filthy language,” struck the women and attacked him multiple times.

In “At Home Again,” Douglass connected the assault to a press campaign that had made him a target:

Having been, during the past few weeks, the special object of attack, marked out by a corrupt and fiendish Press, for assassination, the victim of a continuous train of almost unprecedented abuse — harassed and dogged from day to day by the furious blood-hounds of American Slavery — I should be something more than a Stoic, if I did not feel and acknowledge a sense of profound gratitude . . . that I am again permitted safely to occupy my editorial chair.

Douglass corrected the false particulars but refused to retreat from the principle underlying his conduct. His real “crime,” he wrote, was treating white companions as equals and reducing his belief in human brotherhood to practice: “Not an inch will I retreat — not one jot of zeal will I abate — not one word will I retract.”

Truth and falsehood at Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, a group of armed abolitionists led by John Brown attacked the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry, hoping to capture weapons and ammunition for a slave rebellion. Brown’s plan failed; many of his men were killed, and Brown was wounded and captured. The fallout of Harper’s Ferry also ensnared Douglass. Newspaper and telegraphic reports implicated him in the raid and attributed to the captured raider John Cook the allegation that Douglass had promised to participate, only to flee when the decisive moment arrived. Federal marshals were dispatched to arrest Douglass as an accomplice. With lawmen closing in, Douglass narrowly avoided arrest and a likely death sentence in slaveholding Virginia by escaping to Canada and from there to Britain.

Douglass mocked the telegraph as “the swiftest of liars” when placed in the hands of the slave power. But his public response carefully distinguished between an insult and a damaging allegation of fact. Cook might call him a coward: “I have not one word to say in defense or vindication of my character for courage.” What Douglass categorically denied was that he had ever promised to take part in the raid.

Nor did he accept that defending his reputation obliged him to disclose potentially incriminating details about Brown or expose other abolitionists to prosecution. Moreover, Douglass would continue to “write, speak, publish, organize, combine, and even . . . conspire against Slavery” when success appeared possible.

Douglass confronted a subtler version of the same allegation when the pacifist Elihu Burritt accused him of advocating bloodshed, deserting Brown by leaving him to the gallows and fleeing to England. Burritt’s account contained individual facts that were technically correct: Douglass had met and admired Brown; he had fled America for fear of his life; and Brown had been captured and executed. But to Douglass, press ethics demanded more than avoiding literally false sentences. A writer could arrange “a simple truth” to accomplish “all the malign purposes of a positive untruth.” Biased omission and insinuation could “state a fact, as to convey a complete misrepresentation of its natural import.” Yet once again, his preferred remedy was a reciprocal right of reply in the pages where the untruths had been printed.

The legal aftermath of Harper’s Ferry also provides another rare indication of where Douglass placed the limits of counterspeech, although it may do more to blur than to clarify any Douglassian doctrine. His friend Gerrit Smith suffered a severe mental collapse after the raid. The Chicago Tribune subsequently implied that Smith had feigned insanity to avoid prosecution for supporting Brown. Smith demanded an apology and, when the newspaper refused, brought a $50,000 libel action. In a private letter to Smith, Douglass supported taking legal action against “an accusation of the most damaging kind” for which its editors should “retract or suffer.” The case ended with the Tribune publicly acknowledging that Smith’s illness had been genuine.

The Smith affair complicates any sharp distinction between attacks on public and private life. Smyth’s brothel rumor concerned Douglass’ private sexual conduct, whereas the Tribune’s allegation concerned Smith’s actions following an event of enormous public importance. Yet Douglass pursued legal redress against Smyth and endorsed Smith’s libel lawsuit. Still, the Smyth vs. Smith cases are not necessarily comparable. Douglass’ support for Smith was expressed in a private letter to a distressed friend and benefactor and may not have reflected the redress Douglass thought appropriate if he were on the receiving end. After all, he was the target of significantly more damaging accusations related to the same incident and responded in print rather than in the courts.

The weight of the evidence

The willingness to be corrected did not fade with age. In 1882, Douglass wrote a letter to Robert C. Winthrop Jr. apologizing for an unflattering and misleading portrayal of Winthrop’s father in Douglass’ third autobiography, Life and Times. Douglass promised to “redress this wrong” in future editions, a promise he kept.

Nine years later, an older Frederick Douglass reflected on his combative spirit:

When I was a younger man than now . . . I thought it my duty to contradict all the falsehoods told in respect to my conduct; but I soon found that if I did so I would have little time to do anything else. I therefore concluded to leave many of them to time and events.

This was more a rule of economy than a retreat from counterspeech. Douglass had learned to distinguish falsehoods that threatened important principles if left unanswered from those whose rebuttal would merely distract him from advancing those principles.

When it comes to what remedies Douglass thought proper for redress, the scale of the evidence is overwhelmingly one-sided. Against the Smyth and Smith cases stand countless speeches, letters and editorials answering his critics with facts and arguments. As an editor, he repeatedly opened his own columns to opposing views, including attacks directed against himself. Even when he failed to live up to his professed editorial ideals, as both Garnet and Winthrop Jr. alleged, Douglass ultimately allowed his accuser to answer in his own columns or acknowledged his error and corrected the record. Add to this several examples of Douglass defending other Black journalists and editors when they faced legal jeopardy for their writings. In one instance, Douglass offered the then-considerable sum of $300 in security for John W. Cromwell — editor of the People’s Advocate — who was charged with criminal libel.

As David Blight shows, Douglass was proud, often hypersensitive to criticism and not above vicious personal counterattack, so the temptation to settle scores in court must have been considerable. That he seems to have instructed lawyers only once in response to defamatory statements suggests he meant what he said about answering attacks in print: Rebuttal was owed to “great and vital principles,” not merely to his own wounded pride.

Two things underwrote Douglass’ conviction that the law should protect the pen rather than restrain it: an extraordinary confidence in counterspeech and a demanding conception of what press freedom required. A newspaper worthy of being called the “palladium of liberty” did not protect readers from controversy. It enabled accusations to be answered, exposed its own claims to adversarial testing and gave truth a chance to prevail over falsehood. Douglass did not merely preach that ideal. Across more than half a century of vilification, he practiced it with a record that — if not unblemished — was impressively consistent.

More than 130 years after his death, Douglass still has something to teach the thin-skinned who want free speech for themselves but not for their critics. It has become all too common for politicians and public figures to sue or threaten legal action over attacks that Douglass would have ignored or answered with facts and arguments. Recent examples include Donald Trump’s defamation suits against the media, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s many criminal complaints against online critics over “insults,” free-speech advocate Matt Taibbi’s dismissed lawsuit against the author of a critical book, Gavin Newsom’s $787 million defamation lawsuit against Fox News, and J.K. Rowling’s offer to bankroll libel actions against Amnesty International over its characterization of gender-critical campaigners. It’s a testament to Douglass’ enduring legacy that even in 2026, a culture of free speech infused with his principles would strengthen our ability to speak freely as well as our commitment to truth, integrity, and dialogue.

“If any one is base enough to . . . shout for Jefferson Davis, let him, and do not lock him up for it.”

— Frederick Douglass, on free speech in wartime, 1863

First things first

Censors rarely say they’re punishing speech outright. Instead, a newsroom becomes a “national security” concern. Blocking a road becomes “civil terrorism.” A lecture on Jesus becomes “unprofessional.” That’s why the test of free speech must be what was actually said or done, not what someone in power chooses to call it.

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Frederick Douglass understood this, and held that line at enormous personal cost. In 1863, men who had once mobbed abolitionists were suddenly demanding free speech. Douglass, a former slave, despised their motives but granted their basic point. Most of us will never face a test like that, and this week offers several examples of how often we fail much easier ones.

The press ban meets a Trump judge

Last week, President Trump threw CNN, MS NOW, and Politico out of the White House, citing “purposely negative stories” and national security concerns no one has managed to identify. A federal judge looked at the evidence, wasn’t impressed, and issued a temporary restraining order. carefully traces 130 years of White House press history to explain why. The White House doesn’t have to admit reporters, but once it does, it cannot hand out press passes based on what they write. “Press access may be a privilege,” Gaba writes, “but ‘privilege’ is not a magic word that allows the government to avoid constitutional problems.”

Below the fold

• Pepperdine University banished professor Christina Littlefield from campus for 15 months after she assigned a reading about various depictions of Jesus, including a black one, in her “Christianity and Culture” class — and she said that colleagues’ support for censoring an art exhibit was right out of the “fascist playbook.” She has filed a grievance seeking reinstatement.

• The Department of Education formally repealed the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX rule and restored the 2020 framework. Courts had already struck down the 2024 rule, so the repeal mostly cleans up the books, but explains why the 2020 rule’s speech and due process protections are worth having on paper.

The long view

set out to learn whether Frederick Douglass, like Milton and Mill, had a free speech blind spot. He expected to find a few dozen relevant texts, and his new corpus logs 203 so far. By 1863, Douglass was arguing that pro-slavery mobs seeking to express their views had a right to speak. Mchangama’s verdict is that Douglass came close to absolutism on opinion, but drew a hard line at violence.

Podcasts

The Blessings of Liberty explores constitutional history, Supreme Court debates, and the “American Idea,” hosted by bestselling author and constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen.

In this episode, recorded at the Washington National Cathedral, former White House Domestic Policy Council director Melody Barnes, Episcopal Bishop of Washington Mariann Edgar Budde, and former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Rabbi David Saperstein join to discuss how faith and freedom of conscience can serve the common good and strengthen a democratic society.

So to Speak takes an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy, and stories that define free speech — hosted by FIRE’s Nico Perrino.

Reason senior editor and Rising host Robby Soave joins Nico to talk about the White House’s restrictions on media access, Macklemore getting dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour, and why trying to suppress controversial speech so often backfires. The two also look back on how the free speech fight has changed since they started covering it, as it moved from campus censorship and cancel culture to content moderation.

Required reading

The Manhattan Institute’s has drafted model legislation to turn political road-blocking and vandalism into felony “civil terrorism.” , head of comms at FIRE, doesn’t think lawbreakers should go free. He thinks “terrorism” is a label any party in power will abuse, and points to Oklahoma prosecutors who charged Black Lives Matter protesters as terrorists, as well as the FBI interviewing a Moms for Liberty member over school-board remarks. Treating a blocked road like a truck bomb, Harwood argues, is “a category error.” Well said. I recommend reading it alongside Fortgang’s counterpoint in The Dispatch.

Today in history with

On June 3, 1957, Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao, manager of San Francisco’s City Lights bookstore, was arrested for selling a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems to undercover police inspectors. The poem’s frank treatment of drugs, mental illness, poverty, and sexuality, including homosexuality, made it a target. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet who published it, was arrested too. Ginsberg himself was in Europe and out of reach.

The charges against Murao were dropped because prosecutors couldn’t prove he knew what was in the book. Ferlinghetti went to trial. The defense called a parade of critics and scholars who testified to the poem’s literary merit. On Oct. 3, 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn, who taught a Sunday school Bible class, ruled that Howl was not obscene. Coarse language and sex didn’t make a book obscene, he held. Only a work “entirely lacking in social importance” could be, and he did not believe Howl was without redeeming social importance. The decision came just months after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roth v. United States, which Horn cited. The trial made the poem famous. Howl went on to sell more than a million copies, and the 2010 film Howl dramatized the case. If you’ve never read it, here’s a taste:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night…

“We shouldn’t accept that this is the end,” Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said this week of the UK’s looming under-16 social media ban. “This is a staging post to what must be a very active interventionist state, policing and regulating the online space so that people are safe.” Next March, the initial rollout will begin to keep teens under 16 from using “high-risk” social media apps, and further algorithmic restrictions will later hit those under 18.

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After that, more restrictions will apparently follow. What new “policing and regulating” powers will officials seek?

FIRE has warned for some time now that the rapidly advancing era of age-gating teens from the internet would bring with it a lot more baggage than just restrictions on kids. For one, it will force adults to participate in a vast identity verification scheme, threatening both privacy and anonymous speech. As I explained earlier, we’re moving toward a “papers, please” online landscape, where vital venues of public discussion might now only be open to those who are willing to trust tech companies and the third-party verification apps they use with information that can eliminate their anonymity online, and the governments responsible for mandating the collection of that information.

But there comes with it another threat, exactly the one Nandy now proudly advocates: The door was never going to just open to under-16 bans. Once legislators and regulatory authorities get their foot in that door, they’re going to see exactly how far they can force it open.

“If we were in a situation where we were saying our town centres are now so unsafe that we’ve decided that every child is going to have to stay in their bedrooms, people would rightly be up in arms,” Nandy said. “How have we got to a point where we’re saying these social media sites are so harmful and dangerous that we cannot conceive of any way of protecting our children except to remove them altogether? This ends now.”

It’s quite bizarre that Nandy is speaking as if the UK does not already enforce a very “active” policing of the internet, both via regulatory powers and criminal law. Thousands are arrested annually by police for their social media posts under broad laws targeting “grossly offensive” or “indecent” communications.

Alongside this aggressive policing of speech, British regulators have recently amassed increasing power to target speech and platforms under the Online Safety Act, which “protects children and adults online.” Platforms that fail to take appropriate action under the Act face fines up to £18 million or 10% of their qualifying worldwide revenue, whichever is greater. And platforms are not only required to take down illegal content when flagged, but must “think about how they design their sites to reduce the likelihood of them being used” to host such illegal content. The kind of “illegal content” the regulator Ofcom polices doesn’t just include fraud or drug sales, but “hate” and “terrorism” too — two concepts which the UK interprets very, very broadly.

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Earlier this summer, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport also released plans to potentially require social media platforms to augment their algorithms to ensure government-approved sources like the BBC are “more likely to be at the top of people’s social media feeds when they search for news.” Nandy said of the proposal, “It is vital that we make sure that people have better access to trusted and accurate news and that our regulated public service media is seen and heard in the fierce battle against mis and disinformation.”

If this level of input and power over online speech, along with a new under-16 ban, is only the beginning of the UK’s “active interventionist state,” it’s hard to imagine where it will go next.

Alarmingly, it’s not just in the UK where officials are making clear that they aren’t content to employ existing speech laws against online expression or regulate only how children interact with social media. Just look at Turkey, where officials are threatening new requirements that people link a national ID number to their social media accounts so the government can easily identify speakers. Or Germany, where Chancellor Friedrich Merz is once again pushing for a “real name” rule for social media users and swatting down objections that it would pose a threat to free speech.

We are in a new era of regulating who can speak online, and how. And it was never just going to end with kids.

Pepperdine University professor Christina Littlefield won’t be teaching this fall.

Not because Pepperdine says she is unqualified to teach. Instead, the university put Littlefield on paid leave and banished her from campus for 15 months for “unprofessional” speech and making students “uncomfortable.”

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Her crime? Teaching about depictions of Jesus as black in a religious history class and criticizing colleagues who supported censoring an art exhibition as following the “fascist playbook” on art censorship.

That’s a serious problem at a university that extols professors’ academic freedom to teach controversial material and vigorously debate their colleagues. Pepperdine should live up to its promises and reinstate Littlefield.

Exile

Littlefield is a 14-year Pepperdine professor who earned her Ph.D. in divinity from the University of Cambridge and researches church history and the intersection of religion, politics, media, and culture.

Yet on May 6, Seaver College Dean Lee B. Kats issued Littlefield a “Final Written Notice” accusing her of falling “significantly below the professional standards expected of a faculty member.”

The disciplinary notice alleges that Littlefield used “unprofessional and derogatory names toward colleagues in public settings” and engaged in classroom conduct that “made students feel uncomfortable.” According to Littlefield, administrators cited two examples during an in-person meeting: her criticism of colleagues as following the “fascist playbook” for supporting the school’s censorship of an art exhibition, and a 2024 parent complaint about her assigning students a chapter of the book American Jesus, which examines how different groups in American history have reimagined Jesus in their own cultural, racial, and political image. The book covers depictions of Jesus as an enlightened sage, masculine redeemer, Mormon elder brother, Jewish rabbi, Hindu figure, and black messiah.

The punishment was sweeping.

Pepperdine placed Littlefield on mandatory paid leave through Aug. 1, 2027—a total of 15 months—and barred her from campus and university-sponsored events without the dean’s prior written authorization. The university also ordered her to undergo professional-development training in workplace communication, conflict resolution, and “behavioral sensitivity.”

And that’s not all. Pepperdine ordered Littlefield to “stop all derogatory communication regarding colleagues.”

Black Jesus

Pepperdine’s own promises of academic freedom protect Littlefield’s ability to teach relevant controversial material.

Pepperdine is a private Christian university, so the First Amendment does not require it to provide faculty the same speech protections they would receive from a public university. But the school has voluntarily made certain promises to its faculty.

Its Statement of Academic Freedom declares that “free inquiry and the pursuit of truth are indispensable conditions for the attainment of the goals of any university.” It promises professors “freedom of discussion in the classroom” and says faculty have a “basic duty to encourage freedom of inquiry in peers and in students.”

It properly recognizes faculty’s “freedom in teaching … must not be interpreted to discourage what is ‘controversial,’” adding that “Controversy is at the heart of the free academic inquiry, which this statement is designed to foster.”

Any professor teaching at Pepperdine would rightly believe the university has their back when it comes to complaints about subjectively “offensive” lecture content. They would reasonably feel safe to teach even provocative material to students, to challenge their assumptions and expand their worldviews.

Yet Pepperdine suspended Littlefield for more than a year for teaching about how other scholars discuss a black Jesus in her “Christianity and Culture” class, merely because that “made students feel uncomfortable.”

Whatever one thinks about the notion of a black Jesus, student discomfort is not a legitimate basis for overriding academic freedom. Academic freedom exists in substantial part to protect professors’ ability to introduce relevant ideas, arguments, and materials without having to predict whether every student—or parent—will approve. If universities can punish professors simply because pedagogically relevant material makes someone uncomfortable, the promised “freedom in teaching” becomes meaningless.

In the year of our Lord 2026, God knows faculty criticize each other

Pepperdine is a modern university, not a kindergarten. Yet Littlefield is suspended because she won’t play nice with her colleagues. Administrators cited remarks she made during a faculty meeting criticizing colleagues who supported censoring an art exhibition. Littlefield characterized their approach as following the “fascist playbook.”

Professors shouldn’t face discipline for the inevitable conflict among faculty members with divergent views. Pepperdine itself recognizes that “a demand for civility must not be used to discourage vigorous discussion of controversial matters.” Those promises matter most when faculty disagreements become heated. Faculty have free speech so they can resolve these disputes without resorting to campus inquisitors.

Treating impassioned rhetoric as punishable “unprofessionalism” gives administrators enormous discretion to decide which criticism is sufficiently polite to deserve protection. Worse, Pepperdine’s disciplinary order now commands Littlefield to cease “all derogatory communication regarding colleagues.” Faculty cannot vigorously debate university affairs if criticizing a colleague too sharply could jeopardize their jobs.

Pepperdine should honor its promises

A university cannot credibly promise that “controversy is at the heart” of academic inquiry while suspending a professor for teaching her class and criticizing colleagues. Nor can it promise that demands for civility will not suppress vigorous debate while ordering a professor to stop making “derogatory” comments about her colleagues.

Pepperdine laudably chose to make robust academic freedom part of the bargain it offers its faculty. It benefits from these promises by sending the message that its faculty can be trusted to engage in independent academic inquiry rather than simply parrot whatever the campus’ conventional wisdom might be. For that to be meaningful, those promises must protect professors precisely when their speech becomes controversial, provocative, or uncomfortable.

Littlefield has filed a grievance seeking reinstatement. Pepperdine should grant it.